QCD corrections to the hadronic production of a heavy quark pair and a W-boson including decay correlations

TL;DR

This paper presents an analytic calculation of NLO QCD corrections for the production of a W-boson with a heavy quark pair, including decay correlations, enabling precise predictions for collider experiments.

Contribution

It provides the first analytic expressions for one-loop amplitudes involving massive quarks in W-boson production, integrated into the MCFM program for practical use.

Findings

Analytic formulas for one-loop amplitudes with massive quarks.

Implementation of NLO corrections in MCFM for W+heavy quark production.

Validation through comparison with previous results.

Abstract

We perform an analytic calculation of the one-loop amplitude for the W-boson mediated process 0 \to d u-bar Q Q-bar l-bar l, retaining the mass for the quark Q. The momentum of each of the massive quarks is expressed as the sum of two massless momenta and the corresponding heavy quark spinor is expressed as a sum of two massless spinors. Using a special choice for the heavy quark spinors we obtain analytic expressions for the one-loop amplitudes which are amenable to fast numerical evaluation. The full next-to-leading order (NLO) calculation of hadron+hadron \to W(\to e nu) b b-bar with massive b-quarks is included in the program MCFM. A comparison is performed with previous published work.