Percent level precision physics at the Tevatron: first genuine NNLO QCD corrections to q qbar -> t tbar + X

TL;DR

This paper presents the first NNLO QCD calculation for top-pair production at the Tevatron, significantly reducing theoretical uncertainties and demonstrating the method's applicability to high-precision collider physics.

Contribution

It provides the first NNLO QCD corrections for a process with multiple colored partons and massive fermions at hadron colliders, advancing precision calculations.

Findings

Total cross-section uncertainty reduced to ±2.7%.

Method successfully applied to complex collider processes.

Potential to lower uncertainty below ±2% with further work.

Abstract

We compute the Next-to-Next-to-Leading Order (NNLO) QCD corrections to the partonic reaction that dominates top-pair production at the Tevatron. This is the first ever NNLO calculation of an observable with more than two colored partons, and/or massive fermions, at hadron colliders. Augmenting our fixed order calculation with soft-gluon resummation through Next-to-Next-to-Leading Logarithmic (NNLL) accuracy, we observe that the predicted total inclusive cross-section exhibits a very small perturbative uncertainty, estimated at +-2.7%. We expect that once all sub-dominant partonic reactions are accounted for, and work in this direction is ongoing, the perturbative theoretical uncertainty for this observable could drop below +-2%. Our calculation demonstrates the power of our computational approach and proves it can be successfully applied to all processes at hadron colliders for which high-precision analyses are needed.