We present total and differential cross sections for W b anti-b and Z b anti-b production at the CERN Large Hadron Collider including Next-to-Leading Order (NLO) QCD corrections and full bottom-quark mass effects. We discuss the scale uncertainty
of the total cross sections due to the residual renormalization- and factorization-scale dependence of the truncated perturbative series. We also discuss b-quark mass effects in kinematic distributions by comparing with a calculation that considers massless bottom quarks, as implemented in the Monte Carlo program MCFM. The effects of a non-zero bottom-quark mass (m_b) cannot be neglected in phase-space regions where the relevant kinematic observable, such as the transverse momentum of the bottom quarks or the invariant mass of the bottom-quark pair, are of the order of m_b. Finally, we present the result of a detailed comparison of NLO QCD predictions for W+b-jet production with one or two jets with Tevatron data.
We present NLO QCD results for W/Z gauge boson production with bottom quark pairs at the Tevatron including full bottom-quark mass effects. We study the impact of QCD corrections on both total cross-section and invariant mass distribution of the bott
om-quark pair. Including NLO QCD corrections greatly reduces the dependence of the tree-level cross-section on the renormalization and factorization scales. We also compare our calculation to a calculation that considers massless bottom quarks and find that the bottom-quark mass effects amount to about 8-10% of the total NLO QCD cross-section and can impact the shape of the bottom-quark pair invariant mass distribution, in particular in the low invariant mass region.
