Study of additional jet activity in top quark pair production and decay at the LHC

Abstract

We report on the calculation of the NLO QCD corrections to top quark pair production in association with two hard jets at the LHC. We take into account higher-order effects in both the production and decays of the top-quark pair. The latter are treated in the narrow width approximation and $t\bar{t}$ spin correlations are preserved throughout the calculation. This is the first time that such a complete study for this process is conducted at NLO in QCD. We present results for fiducial cross sections at the integrated and differential level. Furthermore, we investigate kinematic properties of the additional light jets and their distribution in the $pp\to t\bar{t}jj$ process. We examine jets in production and top-quark decays as well as the mixed contribution, where the two hardest non-$b$ jets are present simultaneously in the production and decay processes.