Speaker
Description
We present the first calculation for the production of a W boson in association with massive bottom quarks (Wbb) at hadron colliders at next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in QCD. The use of massive bottom quarks avoids the ambiguities associated with the correct flavour assignment in massless calculations, paving the way to a more realistic comparison with experimental data. The relevant five-point two-loop virtual amplitude with three massive legs required to reach the NNLO accuracy is still not yet available. Exploiting the hierarchy between the bottom quark mass and the characteristic energy scale of the process, a reliable expression has been obtained through a massification procedure applied to the results available for massless bottom quarks. We present phenomenological results considering proton–proton collisions at 13.6 TeV for inclusive Wbb production and within a fiducial region relevant for the associated production of a W boson and a Higgs boson decaying into a bottom-quark pair, for which Wbb production represents one of the most relevant backgrounds. NNLO corrections are substantial and their inclusion is mandatory to obtain reliable predictions.
