Hadronic top-quark pair production in association with a hard jet at next-to-leading order QCD: Phenomenological studies for the Tevatron and the LHC

TL;DR

This paper calculates next-to-leading order QCD corrections for top-antitop pair production with a jet at Tevatron and LHC, showing reduced scale dependence and significant corrections to charge asymmetry, aiding precise phenomenological predictions.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed NLO QCD calculations for top-antitop plus jet production at hadron colliders, including differential cross sections and asymmetry analysis.

Findings

Significant reduction in scale dependence at NLO

Corrections mostly below 20%, indicating perturbative stability

Large corrections to top-quark charge asymmetry at the Tevatron

Abstract

We report on the calculation of the next-to-leading order QCD corrections to the production of top--antitop-quark pairs in association with a hard jet at the Tevatron and at the LHC. Results for integrated and differential cross sections are presented. We find a significant reduction of the scale dependence. In most cases the corrections are below 20% indicating that the perturbative expansion is well under control. Moreover, the forward--backward charge asymmetry of the top-quark, which is analyzed at the Tevatron, is studied at next-to-leading order. We find large corrections suggesting that the definition of the observable has to be refined.