Resummed differential cross sections for top-quark pairs at the LHC

Understand

We present state of the art resummation predictions for differential cross sections in top-quark pair production at the LHC.

• They are derived from a formalism which allows the simultaneous resummation of both soft and small-mass logarithms, which endanger the convergence of fixed-order perturbative series in the boosted regime, where the partonic center-of-mass energy is much larger than the mass to the top quark.
• We combine such a double resummation at NNLL$'$ accuracy with standard soft-gluon resummation at NNLL accuracy and with NLO calculations, so that our results are applicable throughout the whole phase space.
• We find that the resummation effects on the differential distributions are significant, bringing theoretical predictions into better agreement with experimental data compared to fixed-order calculations.