Type of Document	Dissertation
Author	Febres Cordero, Fernando M.
Author's Email Address	ffebres@hep.fsu.edu
URN	etd-10142007-213845
Title	Next-To-Leading-Order Corrections to Weak Boson Production With a Massive Quark Jet Pair at Hadron Colliders
Degree	Doctor of Philosophy
Department	Physics, Department of
Advisory Committee	Advisor Name Title Laura Reina Committee Chair Harrison Prosper Committee Member Howard Baer Committee Member Jorge Piekarewicz Committee Member Paolo Aluffi Committee Member
Keywords	W/Z Plus Bottom Quarks NLO QCD Single-top Higgs
Date of Defense	2007-09-26
Availability	unrestricted
Abstract We present the calculation of Next-to-Leading-Order Quantum Chromo Dynamics corrections for the production of W or Z weak bosons associated with a bottom anti-bottom quark pair at hadron colliders (ppbar, pp to W/Z bbbar), including the effects of a non-zero bottom-quark mass. We find a considerable reduction of the renormalization and factorization scale dependence of our results with respect to Leading-Order calculations. In particular, we study the impact of the corrections on the total cross section and invariant mass distributions of the bottom anti-bottom quark pair at the Fermilab Tevatron ppbar collider. We perform a detailed comparison with a calculation that considers massless bottom quarks and find significant deviations in regions of phase space with small invariant mass of the bottom anti-bottom quark pair. Our results will be relevant to ongoing and future searches at hadron colliders, as the W/Z bbbar production mode is the main background to important signals, such as light Standard Model Higgs boson production or single top-quark production.
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