NNLO QCD corrections to $Wb\bar{b}$ production at the LHC

Abstract

We compute theoretical predictions for the production of a W-boson in association with a bottom-quark pair at hadron colliders at next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in QCD, including the leptonic decay of the W-boson, while treating the bottom quark as massless. This calculation constitutes the very first $2\to 3$ process with a massive external particle to be studied at such a perturbative order. We derive an analytic expression for the required two-loop five-particle amplitudes in the leading colour approximation employing finite-field methods. Numerical results for the cross section and differential distributions are presented for the Large Hadron Collider at $\sqrt{s}=8$ TeV. We observe an improvement of the perturbative convergence for the inclusive case and for the prediction with a jet veto upon the inclusion of the NNLO QCD corrections.

Comments: 6 pages, 3 figure, analytical expressions for the two-loop amplitudes are provided in the ancillary files, numerical results for the differential cross section are provided in the ancillary files. v2: fixed minor typos in the text