The production of a W boson and two jets, at least one of which contains a b quark, is a principal background to single-top production, Higgs production, and signals of new physics at hadron colliders. We present a next-to-leading-order (NLO) calculation of the cross section at the Fermilab Tevatron and the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The NLO cross section differs substantially from that at LO, and we provide a context in which to understand this result.
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