Top quark pair production in association with a jet: QCD corrections and jet radiation in top quark decays

TL;DR

This paper presents a next-to-leading order QCD analysis of top quark pair production with an associated jet, emphasizing the importance of including jet radiation in decays for accurate kinematic distributions at colliders.

Contribution

It provides a detailed NLO QCD calculation of ttbar+jet production including top decay and jet radiation effects, improving the modeling of relevant distributions.

Findings

QCD corrections significantly alter distribution shapes

Jet radiation in decays impacts kinematic variables

Results agree reasonably with D0 measurements

Abstract

We consider top quark pair production in association with a hard jet through next-to-leading order in perturbative QCD. Top quark decays are treated in the narrow width approximation and spin correlations are retained throughout the computation. We include hard jet radiation by top quark decay products and explore their importance for basic kinematic distributions at the Tevatron and the LHC. Our results suggest that QCD corrections and jet radiation in decays can lead to significant changes in shapes of basic distributions and, therefore, need to be included for the description of ttbar+jet production. We compare the shape of the transverse momentum distribution of a top quark pair recently measured by the D0 collaboration with the result of our computation and find reasonable agreement.