The $q_T$ subtraction method for top quark production at hadron colliders

Abstract

We consider QCD radiative corrections to top-quark pair production at hadron colliders. We use the $q_T$ subtraction formalism to perform a fully-differential computation for this process. Our calculation is accurate up to the next-to-leading order in QCD perturbation theory and it includes all the flavour off-diagonal partonic channels at the next-to-next-to-leading order. We present a comparison of our numerical results with those obtained with the publicly available numerical programs MCFM and Top++.

Comments: Few references and comments added, expanded discussion on the qt subtraction method, result unchanged, version published in EPJC