The theoretical top quark cross section at the Tevatron and the LHC

Abstract

We present results for the top quark pair cross section at the Tevatron and the LHC. We use the resummed double differential cross section, employing the fully kinematics-dependent soft anomalous dimension matrices, to calculate the soft-gluon contributions at next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO). We improve and update our previous estimates by refining our methods, including further subleading terms, and employing the most recent parton distribution function sets. The NNLO soft corrections significantly enhance the NLO cross section while considerably reducing the scale dependence. We provide a detailed discussion of all theoretical uncertainties in our calculation, including kinematics, scale, and parton distributions uncertainties and clarify the differences between our work and other approaches in the literature.