Open bottom production at NNLO+NNLL

TL;DR

This paper presents the first NNLO+NNLL calculation for open bottom production at hadron colliders, significantly reducing theoretical uncertainties and improving agreement with experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel NNLO+NNLL computation for bottom quark production, enhancing precision over previous methods.

Findings

Reduced theory errors to a few percent at high transverse momenta

Better agreement with Tevatron data compared to lower-order predictions

Inclusion of hadronisation and decay processes for comprehensive predictions

Abstract

In this talk, I presented some of the results of the first calculation of open bottom production at hadron colliders at NNLO+NNLL, i.e. a next-to-next-to-leading-order calculation that resums collinear logarithms at next-to-next-to-leading-logarithmic accuracy. This new computation achieves significantly reduced theory errors compared to previous calculations, with errors of just a few percent at high transverse momenta. These results are compared to data from many measurements performed at the Tevatron, where lower-order predictions have previously been found to underestimate the cross section. To perform such comparisons, the hadronisation and decay of the $b$-quark are included in the theory calculation where needed, yielding predictions for a wide range of final states.