Hadronic top-quark pair-production with one jet and parton showering

TL;DR

This paper presents a next-to-leading order calculation of top-quark pair production with one jet, including decays and spin correlations, interfaced with parton shower programs, and studies its phenomenological implications at colliders.

Contribution

It introduces a matched NLO calculation for heavy-flavor plus one jet production with parton showering, incorporating top decays and spin correlations, using the POWHEG BOX framework.

Findings

Parton shower significantly affects top-quark charge asymmetry.

The calculation provides detailed predictions for LHC and Tevatron.

Inclusion of spin correlations improves decay modeling accuracy.

Abstract

We present a calculation of heavy-flavor production in hadronic collisions in association with one jet matched to parton shower Monte Carlo programs at next-to-leading order in perturbative QCD. Top-quark decays are included and spin correlations in the decay products are taken into account. The calculation builds on existing results for the radiative corrections to heavy-quark plus one jet production and uses the POWHEG BOX for the interface to the parton shower programs PYTHIA or HERWIG. A broad phenomenological study for the Large Hadron Collider and the Tevatron is presented. In particular we study---as one important sample application---the impact of the parton shower on the top-quark charge asymmetry.