Next-to-leading order QCD corrections to the production of $B_c$ and $B_c^{\ast }$ through $W^{+}$-boson decays

Abstract

In this paper, we calculate the total decay widths for the $W^{+}$-boson decays, $W^{+}\to B_c+b+\bar{s}+X$ and $W^{+}\to B_c^{\ast }+b+\bar{s}+X$, up to next-to-leading order (NLO) accuracy within the framework of the nonrelativistic QCD theory. Both the fixed-order and the fragmentation approaches are adopted to do the calculation. Differential decay widths $d\Gamma /dz$ and $d\Gamma /d{s}_1$ are also given. We find that the NLO corrections are significant in those two $W^{+}$ decay channels. Our numerical results show that at the LHC, there are about $7.03\times 10^4$ $B_c$-meson events and $5.10\times 10^4$ $B_c^{\ast }$-meson events to be produced via the $W^{+}$-boson decays per operation year.

Comments: 11 pages, 9 figures