Inclusive Heavy Flavor Hadroproduction in NLO QCD: the Exact Analytic Result

Understand

We present the first exact analytic result for all partonic channels contributing to the total cross section for the production of a pair of heavy flavors in hadronic collisions in NLO QCD.

• Our calculation is an essential step in the derivation of the top quark pair production cross section at NNLO in QCD, which is a cornerstone of the precision LHC program.
• Our results uncover the analytical structures behind observables with heavy flavors at higher orders.
• They also reveal surprising and non-trivial implications for kinematics close to partonic threshold.