Speaker
Description
I will present results for the complete next-to-leading-order (NLO) corrections to full off-shell top-quark pair production in the $\ell+j$ decay channel, $pp \to \ell^- \bar{\nu}_\ell\, j_b j_b \, jj + X$, with $\ell^- = e^-,\, \mu^-$. The calculation consistently includes finite-width effects of the top quarks and $W^\pm/Z$ gauge bosons, as well as all doubly-, singly-, and non-resonant contributions and their interferences. All Born-level contributions, spanning perturbative orders from ${\cal O}(\alpha_s^4\alpha^2)$ to ${\cal O}(\alpha_s^0\alpha^6)$, are corrected by both NLO QCD and NLO electroweak effects, and all relevant partonic initial states and decay channels are taken into account.
I will briefly discuss infrared-safe treatments of photons and jets, based on parton-to-photon fragmentation and photon-to-jet conversion functions. Results are shown for integrated and differential fiducial cross sections at the LHC Run III energy of $\sqrt{s}=13.6$ TeV, including an assessment of subleading NLO effects such as electroweak Sudakov logarithms and non-resonant QCD backgrounds. Two analysis strategies, with and without a resonance-enhancing cut on the light-jet invariant mass, $|M_{jj}-m_W|<{\cal Q}_{cut}=20$ GeV, are compared to illustrate their impact on background suppression and off-shell effects.
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