Theoretical status and prospects for top-quark pair production at hadron colliders

Abstract

We present an update of the theoretical predictions for the cross section of top-quark pair production at Tevatron and LHC. In particular we employ improvements due to soft gluon resummation at next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy. We expand the resummed results and derive analytical finite-order cross sections through next-to-next-to-leading order which are exact in all logarithmically enhanced terms near threshold. These results are the best present estimates for the top-quark pair production cross section. We investigate the scale dependence as well as the sensitivity on the parton luminosities.

Comments: v2 published in PRD; references added, eqs.(19),(21) corrected and cross section numbers updated