Soft-gluon corrections for $tqZ$ production

Abstract

We study soft-gluon corrections for the associated production of a single top quark and a $Z$ boson ($tqZ$ production) at hadron colliders. We find that the radiative corrections are dominated by soft-gluon emission. We calculate the approximate NNLO (aNNLO) cross section at LHC energies, including uncertainties from scale dependence and from parton distributions. We also calculate differential distributions in top-quark rapidity. We show that the aNNLO corrections are significant and they enhance the NLO cross section while decreasing theoretical uncertainties.

Comments: 10 pages, 4 figures