2008/06/30 by F. Febres Cordero, L. Reina, Laura Reina +1
Physics and Astronomy · #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.78.074014
published as Phys.Rev.D78:074014,2008 · 26 pages, 16 postscript figures, typos corrected, two comments added and references updated, version to appear in Physical Review D
openalex publication_date 2008/10/15 · arxiv created 2008/10/30 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We calculate the next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD corrections to Zbb 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 pp 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 Zbb 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.