Associated production of a W or Z boson with bottom quarks at the Tevatron and the LHC

TL;DR

This paper provides detailed NLO QCD calculations for W and Z boson production with bottom quarks at the LHC, including mass effects and comparisons with Tevatron data, enhancing precision in theoretical predictions.

Contribution

It introduces comprehensive NLO QCD predictions for W/Z + bottom quarks production, incorporating bottom-quark mass effects and comparison with experimental data.

Findings

Mass effects are significant in certain kinematic regions.

NLO predictions agree with Tevatron data within uncertainties.

Scale dependence impacts total cross section estimates.

Abstract

We present total and differential cross sections for W b anti-b and Z b anti-b production at the CERN Large Hadron Collider including Next-to-Leading Order (NLO) QCD corrections and full bottom-quark mass effects. We discuss the scale uncertainty of the total cross sections due to the residual renormalization- and factorization-scale dependence of the truncated perturbative series. We also discuss b-quark mass effects in kinematic distributions by comparing with a calculation that considers massless bottom quarks, as implemented in the Monte Carlo program MCFM. The effects of a non-zero bottom-quark mass (m_b) cannot be neglected in phase-space regions where the relevant kinematic observable, such as the transverse momentum of the bottom quarks or the invariant mass of the bottom-quark pair, are of the order of m_b. Finally, we present the result of a detailed comparison of NLO QCD predictions for W+b-jet production with one or two jets with Tevatron data.