Abstract

We present results of a computation of NLO QCD corrections to the production of an off-shell top-antitop pair in association with an off-shell W+ boson in proton-proton collisions. As the calculation is based on the full matrix elements for the process mathrm{pp}to {mathrm{e}}^{+}{v}_{mathrm{e}}{mu}^{-}{overline{v}}_{mu }{tau}^{+}{v}_{tau}mathrm{b}overline{mathrm{b}} , all off-shell, spin-correlation, and interference effects are included. The NLO QCD corrections are about 20% for the integrated cross-section. Using a dynamical scale, the corrections to most distributions are at the same level, while some distributions show much larger K-factors in suppressed regions of phase space. We have performed a second calculation based on a double-pole approximation. While the corresponding results agree with the full calculation within few per cent for integrated cross-sections, the discrepancy can reach 10% and more in regions of phase space that are not dominated by top-antitop production. As a consequence, on-shell calculations should only be trusted to this level of accuracy.

Highlights

  • The associated production of top quarks with a W± boson in the fullyleptonic decay channel represents a rare process at the LHC, owing to the presence of two like-sign leptons in the final state

  • We present results of a computation of next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD corrections to the production of an off-shell top-antitop pair in association with an off-shell W+ boson in protonproton collisions

  • The focus is put on the differences between the results obtained with the fixed scale and those obtained with μ(0c) and μ(0d), as we expect that the choice of a well-motivated dynamical scale is beneficial for a better behaviour of NLO QCD corrections, in particular, in the tails of energy-dependent distributions

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Summary

Details of the calculation

In this paper we present the NLO QCD corrections to the process pp → e+νe μ−νμ τ +ντ b b. The calculation has been performed with MoCaNLO, a Monte Carlo generator that has been used to simulate other processes involving top quarks with NLO EW and QCD accuracy [37,38,39,40] It is interfaced with Recola [41, 42] which provides the tree-level and one-loop SM amplitudes using the Collier library [43] to perform the reduction and numerical evaluation of one-loop integrals [44,45,46]. In most of the diagrams, the propagating gluon is radiated from initial-state quarks and converts to bb [see for example figures 1(c), 1(d) and 1(f)] Such diagrams give a small contribution to the squared amplitude, since they do not contain resonant top or antitop quarks. We observe that all diagrams contain at least one resonant W+ boson

Real corrections
Virtual corrections
Validation
Input parameters
Fiducial cross-sections
Differential cross-sections
Comparison of different central-scale definitions
Differential distributions for the default scale
Comparison with double-pole approximation
Findings
Conclusions

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