The total top quark pair production cross-section at hadron colliders through O(alpha_S^4)

TL;DR

This paper calculates the NNLO QCD corrections to the total top quark pair production cross-section at hadron colliders, significantly reducing theoretical uncertainties and aligning well with experimental data.

Contribution

It provides the complete NNLO QCD correction for top pair production, including soft-gluon resummation, enhancing precision in theoretical predictions.

Findings

Theoretical uncertainty reduced to about 3% at LHC and 2.2% at Tevatron.

Good agreement between Standard Model predictions and experimental measurements.

High precision enables better constraints on parton distribution functions and new physics searches.

Abstract

We compute the next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) QCD correction to the total cross-section for the reaction gg \to t\bar t + X. Together with the partonic channels we computed previously, the result derived in this letter completes the set of NNLO QCD corrections to the total top pair production cross-section at hadron colliders. Supplementing the fixed order results with soft-gluon resummation with next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy we estimate that the theoretical uncertainty of this observable due to unknown higher order corrections is about 3% at the LHC and 2.2% at the Tevatron. We observe a good agreement between the Standard Model predictions and the available experimental measurements. The very high theoretical precision of this observable allows a new level of scrutiny in parton distribution functions and new physics searches.