Hard-photon production with b jets at hadron colliders

Abstract

We present total and differential cross sections for the production of a hard photon with up to two b jets at both the Tevatron with center-of-mass energy 1.96 TeV and the Large Hadron Collider with center-of-mass energy 8 TeV, including Next-to-Leading Order (NLO) QCD corrections and full b-quark mass effects. We study the theoretical uncertainty due to the residual renormalization- and factorization-scale dependence and explain its origin on the basis of the different subprocesses contributing to the NLO cross section. We specifically address the case of the production of a hard photon with at least one b jet and compare the NLO QCD predictions in both the Four- and Five-Flavor-Number Schemes to the experimental measurements obtained by CDF and D0.