Top Quark Pair Production in Association with a Jet with Next-to-Leading-Order QCD Off-Shell Effects at the Large Hadron Collider

Abstract

We present a complete description of top quark pair production in association with a jet in the dilepton channel. Our calculation is accurate to next-to-leading order (NLO) in QCD and includes all nonresonant diagrams, interferences, and off-shell effects of the top quark. Moreover, nonresonant and off-shell effects due to the finite W gauge boson width are taken into account. This calculation constitutes the first fully realistic NLO computation for top quark pair production with a final state jet in hadronic collisions. Numerical results for differential distributions as well as total cross sections are presented for the Large Hadron Collider at 8TeV. With our inclusive cuts, NLO predictions reduce the unphysical scale dependence by more than a factor of 3 and lower the total rate by about 13% compared to leading-order QCD predictions. In addition, the size of the top quark off-shell effects is estimated to be below 2%.