Top-Quark Pair Production Beyond Next-to-Leading Order

TL;DR

This paper presents advanced calculations of top-quark pair production cross sections at hadron colliders, employing soft-collinear effective theory to resum threshold logarithms up to NNLL order, improving theoretical predictions.

Contribution

The study introduces a novel application of soft-collinear effective theory to compute differential cross sections with NNLL resummation for top-quark pair production.

Findings

Enhanced accuracy in invariant-mass distribution predictions

Improved total cross section estimates

Comparison with other methods shows better theoretical control

Abstract

We report on recent calculations of the differential cross section for top-quark pair production at hadron colliders. The results are differential with respect to the top-pair invariant mass and to the partonic scattering angle. In these calculations, which were carried out by employing soft-collinear effective theory techniques, we resummed threshold logarithms up to next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic order. Starting from the differential cross section, it is possible to obtain theoretical predictions for the invariant-mass distribution and the total cross section. We summarize here our results for these observables, and we compare them with the results obtained from different calculational methods.