NLO QCD Predictions for $Wb\bar b$ Production in Association with up to Three Light Jets at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper provides next-to-leading order QCD predictions for Wbar{b} production with up to three jets at the LHC, including heavy-fermion effects and assessing uncertainties relevant for Higgs boson studies.

Contribution

It introduces advanced NLO QCD calculations for Wbar{b} plus multi-jet production, incorporating massive bottom quarks and heavy-fermion loops, with publicly available data sets.

Findings

QCD corrections significantly affect total and differential cross sections.

Theoretical uncertainties are quantified for background estimates in Higgs analyses.

Results are provided for multiple jet multiplicities up to three jets.

Abstract

In this article we present the next-to-leading order QCD predictions for $Wb\bar{b}+n$-jet ($n=0,1,2,3$) production at the Large Hadron Collider with $\sqrt{s}=13$ TeV. We work in the four-flavor number scheme with a non-vanishing bottom-quark mass and include all subprocesses at leading electroweak order as well as all heavy-fermion-loop effects. We show the impact of QCD corrections for total as well as differential cross sections and make an assessment of theoretical uncertainties of $Wb\bar{b}$ production viewed as an irreducible background to $H(\rightarrow b{\bar b})W$ studies. For the calculations we have employed an upgraded version of the BlackHat library which can handle massive fermions in combination with SHERPA. Our results can be explored through publicly available $n$-tuple sets.