Wbbj production at NLO with POWHEG+MiNLO

TL;DR

This paper introduces a sophisticated event generator for W boson production with two bottom quarks and a jet at hadron colliders, incorporating NLO accuracy, spin correlations, and the MiNLO method for improved predictions.

Contribution

It presents a new NLO+PS event generator for Wbbj production with full bottom-mass effects, spin correlations, and the MiNLO approach, validated against experimental data.

Findings

The generator produces finite differential cross sections at low jet transverse momentum.

Comparison with experimental data shows good agreement.

The approach reduces theoretical uncertainties in Wbbj predictions.

Abstract

We present a next-to-leading order plus parton-shower event generator for the production of a W boson plus two bottom quarks and a jet at hadron colliders, implemented in the POWHEG BOX framework. Bottom-mass effects and spin correlations of the decay products of the W boson are fully taken into account. The code has been automatically generated using the two available interfaces to MadGraph4 and GoSam, the last one updated to a new version. We have applied the MiNLO prescription to our Wbbj calculation, obtaining a finite differential cross section also in the limit of vanishing jet transverse momentum. Furthermore, we have compared several key distributions for Wbbj production with those generated with a next-to-leading order plus parton-shower event generator for Wbb production, and studied their factorization- and renormalization-scale dependence. Finally, we have compared our results with recent experimental data from the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations.