General Mass treatment for Z boson production in association with a heavy quark at hadron colliders

TL;DR

This paper applies advanced general mass schemes to improve the theoretical description of Z boson production with heavy quarks at hadron colliders, incorporating higher-order QCD corrections.

Contribution

It introduces subtraction and residual heavy-quark PDFs within the ACOT and S-ACOT schemes for more accurate heavy-quark initiated processes.

Findings

Enhanced calculation of Z+heavy quark production beyond leading order.

Implementation of subtraction and residual PDFs for higher-order accuracy.

Demonstrated applicability to proton-proton collision processes.

Abstract

We present the application of the ACOT and S-ACOT general mass variable flavor number schemes to proton-proton collisions with particular attention to the production of final states with at least one heavy quark. Subtraction and residual heavy-quark parton distribution functions are introduced to facilitate the implementation of this scheme at higher orders in perturbative QCD. The calculation of Z-boson hadronic production with at least one $b$ jet beyond the lowest order in QCD is considered for illustration purposes.