We present results from the analytic calculation of top+antitop+Higgs hadronic production at Next-to-Leading Order in QCD interfaced with parton-shower Monte Carlo event generators in the POWHEG BOX framework. We consider kinematic distributions of t
he top quark and Higgs boson at the 8 TeV Large Hadron Collider and study the theoretical uncertainties due to specific choices of renormalization/factorization scales and parton-showering algorithms, namely PYTHIA and HERWIG. The importance of spin-correlations in the production and decay stages of a top/antitop quark is discussed on the example of kinematic distributions of leptons originating from the top/antitop decays. The corresponding code is now part of the public release of the POWHEG BOX.
In these lectures I briefly review the Higgs mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking and focus on the most relevant aspects of the phenomenology of the Standard Model Higgs boson at hadron colliders, namely the Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collid
er. Emphasis is put in particular on the Higgs-physics program of both LHC experiments and on the theoretical activity that has entailed from the the need of providing accurate predictions for both signal and background in Higgs-boson searches.
We calculate the production of a W boson and a single b jet to next-to-leading order in QCD at the Fermilab Tevatron and the CERN Large Hadron Collider. Both exclusive and inclusive cross sections are presented. We separately consider the cross secti
on for jets containing a single b quark and jets containing a b-anti b pair. There are a wide variety of processes that contribute, and it is necessary to include them all in order to have a complete description at both colliders.
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.
