Theoretical results for top quark production

Understand

I discuss and compare several approaches to higher-order calculations of top quark production.

• I study the relative effectiveness of the approaches in approximating the exact NNLO results for the top-pair total cross section and highlight the theoretical and numerical differences between them.
• I show that the results from my soft-gluon resummation method are nearly identical to the exact NNLO cross section at all LHC and Tevatron energies.
• This agreement has important consequences for the validity of existing approximate NNLO differential distributions, for further refinements of the predictions, and for applications to other processes such as single-top production.