Heavy-flavor hadro-production with heavy-quark masses renormalized in the $\overline{\mathrm{MS}}$, MSR and on-shell schemes

Abstract

We present predictions for heavy-quark production at the Large Hadron Collider making use of the $\overline{\mathrm{MS}}$ and MSR renormalization schemes for the heavy-quark mass as alternatives to the widely used on-shell renormalization scheme. We compute single and double differential distributions including QCD corrections at next-to-leading order and investigate the renormalization and factorization scale dependence as well as the perturbative convergence in these mass renormalization schemes. The implementation is based on publicly available programs, $\text{MCFM}$ and $\text{xFitter}$, extending their capabilities. Our results are applied to extract the top-quark mass using measurements of the total and differential $t\bar{t}$ production cross-sections and to investigate constraints on parton distribution functions, especially on the gluon distribution at low $x$ values, from available LHC data on heavy-flavor hadro-production.

Comments: 52 pages, 21 figures, 5 tables; v2: published version, extended with respect to v1 to account for all referee comments