Production and decay of a heavy boson in association with top quarks

TL;DR

This paper presents NLO QCD corrections for the production of a heavy boson with top quarks in proton-proton collisions, including all relevant diagrams and effects, and compares full predictions to the narrow-width approximation.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive NLO QCD calculations for pp to t-tbar plus a heavy boson, including all resonant and non-resonant contributions and interference effects.

Findings

Differential cross sections computed for various scales and PDFs.

Theoretical uncertainties from higher-order terms and PDFs analyzed.

Comparison shows differences between full predictions and narrow-width approximation.

Abstract

We briefly report on NLO QCD corrections to the $pp \to t\bar{t} B +X$ process, where $B$ stands for $H,\,W^\pm$ or $Z$. In the calculation all double-, single and non-resonant Feynman diagrams, interferences and finite-width effects are included for the top quark and $W^\pm/Z$ gauge bosons. Numerical results are shown at the differential cross section level for various factorisation and renormalisation scale settings and a few PDF sets. The main theoretical uncertainties associated with neglected higher-order terms in the perturbative expansion and with different parametrisations of the PDFs are also discussed. Furthermore, we compare our complete predictions for $pp\to t\bar{t} B+X$ in multi-lepton final states to the calculation in the narrow-width approximation.