A fully differential calculation of the next-to-leading order QCD corrections to the production of Z-boson pairs in association with a hard jet at the Tevatron and LHC is presented. This process is an important background for Higgs particle and new physics searches at hadron colliders. We find sizable corrections for cross sections and differential distributions, particularly at the LHC. Residual scale uncertainties are typically at the 10% level and can be further reduced by applying a veto against the emission of a second hard jet. Our results confirm that NLO corrections do not simply rescale LO predictions.
We report on the calculation of the next-to-leading order QCD corrections to the production of W-boson pairs in association with a hard jet at the Tevatron and the LHC, which is an important source of background for Higgs and new-physics searches. The corrections stabilize the leading-order prediction for the cross section considerably, in particular if a veto against the emission of a second hard jet is applied.
We present results for the next-to-leading order QCD corrections to the production and semi-leptonic decays of a top quark pair in hadron collisions, retaining all spin correlations. To evaluate the virtual corrections, we employ generalized D-dimensional unitarity. The computation is implemented in a numerical program which allows detailed studies of ttbar-related observables at the Tevatron and the LHC.
We compute the QCD corrections to the production of a top quark pair in association with one hard jet at the Tevatron and the LHC, using the method of generalized D-dimensional unitarity. Top quark decays are included at leading order in perturbative QCD. We present kinematic distributions of top quark decay products in lepton plus jets and dilepton final states at the Tevatron and the LHC, using realistic selection cuts. We confirm a strong reduction of the top quark forward-backward asymmetry for the process ttbar+jet at the Tevatron at next-to-leading order, first observed by Dittmaier, Uwer and Weinzierl. We argue that there is a natural way to understand this reduction and that it does not imply a breakdown of the perturbative expansion for the asymmetry.
Results for the complete NLO electroweak corrections to Standard Model Higgs production via gluon fusion are included in the total cross section for hadronic collisions. Artificially large threshold effects are avoided working in the complex-mass scheme. The numerical impact at LHC (Tevatron) energies is explored for Higgs mass values up to 500 GeV (200 GeV). Assuming a complete factorization of the electroweak corrections, one finds a +5 % shift with respect to the NNLO QCD cross section for a Higgs mass of 120 GeV both at the LHC and the Tevatron. Adopting two different factorization schemes for the electroweak effects, an estimate of the corresponding total theoretical uncertainty is computed.
Higgs-pair production via gluon fusion is the dominant production mechanism of Higgs-boson pairs at hadron colliders. In this work, we present details of our numerical determination of the full next-to-leading-order (NLO) QCD corrections to the leading top-quark loops. Since gluon fusion is a loop-induced process at leading order, the NLO calculation requires the calculation of massive two-loop diagrams with up to four different mass/energy scales involved. With the current methods, this can only be done numerically, if no approximations are used. We discuss the setup and details of our numerical integration. This will be followed by a phenomenological analysis of the NLO corrections and their impact on the total cross section and the invariant Higgs-pair mass distribution. The last part of our work will be devoted to the determination of the residual theoretical uncertainties with special emphasis on the uncertainties originating from the scheme and scale dependence of the (virtual) top mass. The impact of the trilinear Higgs-coupling variation on the total cross section will be discussed.