Bottom-quark production at hadron colliders: fully differential predictions in NNLO QCD

TL;DR

This paper presents the first fully differential NNLO QCD calculations for bottom-quark pair production at hadron colliders, improving theoretical precision and agreement with experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel fully differential NNLO QCD calculation for bottom-quark production using the $q_T$ subtraction formalism within the Matrix framework.

Findings

NNLO corrections are 25-35% significant.

Inclusion of NNLO reduces theoretical uncertainties.

Predictions align better with experimental results.

Abstract

We report on the first fully differential calculation of the next-to-next-to-leading-order (NNLO) QCD radiative corrections to the production of bottom-quark pairs at hadron colliders. The calculation is performed by using the $q_T$ subtraction formalism to handle and cancel infrared singularities in real and virtual contributions. The computation is implemented in the Matrix framework, thereby allowing us to efficiently compute arbitrary infrared-safe observables in the four-flavour scheme. We present selected predictions for bottom-quark production at the Tevatron and at the LHC at different collider energies, and we perform some comparisons with available experimental results. We find that the NNLO corrections are sizeable, typically of the order of $25$-$35\%$, and they lead to a significant reduction of the perturbative uncertainties. Therefore, their inclusion is crucial for an accurate theoretical description of this process.