W- and Z-boson production with a massive bottom-quark pair at the Large Hadron Collider

We present total and differential cross sections for W b anti-b and Z b anti-b production at the CERN Large Hadron Collider with a center-of-mass energy of 14 TeV, including Next-to-Leading Order (NLO) QCD corrections and full bottom-quark mass effects. We also provide numerical results obtained with a center-of-mass energy of 10 TeV. We study the scale uncertainty of the total cross sections due to the residual renormalization- and factorization-scale dependence of the truncated perturbative series. While in the case of Z b anti-b production the scale uncertainty of the total cross section is reduced by NLO QCD corrections, the W b anti-b production process at NLO in QCD still suffers from large scale uncertainties, in particular in the inclusive case. We also perform a detailed comparison 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. The effects on the total production cross sections are usually smaller than the residual scale uncertainty at NLO in QCD.

NLO QCD corrections to Z b anti-b production with massive bottom quarks at the Fermilab Tevatron

We calculate the Next-to-Leading Order (NLO) QCD corrections to Z b anti-b production in hadronic collisions including full bottom-quark mass effects. We present results for the total cross section and the invariant mass distribution of the bottom-quark jet pair at the Fermilab Tevatron p anti-p collider. We perform a detailed comparison with a calculation that considers massless bottom quarks, as implemented in the Monte Carlo program MCFM. We find that neglecting bottom-quark mass effects overestimates the total NLO QCD cross section for Z b anti-b production at the Tevatron by about 7%, independent of the choice of the renormalization and factorization scales. Moreover, bottom-quark mass effects can impact the shape of the bottom-quark pair invariant mass distribution, in particular in the low invariant mass region.