Top quark production at threshold with O(alpha_s^2) accuracy

Abstract

We calculate the next-to-next-to-leading order correction to the cross section for top quark pair production in e+e- annihilation in the threshold region, resumming all O [ (alpha_s/beta)^n (alpha_s^2, beta^2, alpha_s beta) ] terms of perturbation series. We find that the magnitude of the NNLO correction is comparable to the size of the NLO corrections.

Comments: 15 pages, Latex, one figure, some misprints corrected