Quantifying quark mass effects at the LHC: A study of pp -> b anti-b b anti-b + X at next-to-leading order

TL;DR

This paper presents next-to-leading order QCD calculations for four bottom quark production at the LHC, highlighting the effects of bottom quark mass and theoretical uncertainties in cross sections and distributions.

Contribution

It introduces a new subtraction formalism within HELAC-DIPOLES for NLO real radiation, providing precise predictions including mass effects and uncertainty estimates.

Findings

Higher-order corrections significantly affect cross sections.

Bottom quark mass impacts differential distributions.

The new subtraction method improves NLO calculations.

Abstract

The production of four bottom quarks is an important benchmark channel for Higgs analyses and searches for new physics at the LHC. We report on the calculation of the next-to-leading order QCD corrections to the process pp -> b anti-b b anti-b + X with the HELAC-NLO automated framework, and present results for inclusive cross sections and differential distributions. We discuss the impact of the higher-order corrections and, in particular, the effect of the bottom quark mass. In addition, we provide an estimate of the theoretical uncertainty from the variation of the renormalisation and factorisation scales and the parton distribution functions. The results are obtained with a new subtraction formalism for real radiation at next-to-leading order, implemented in the HELAC-DIPOLES package.