Next-to-next-to-leading order soft-gluon corrections in top quark hadroproduction

Abstract

We calculate next-to-next-to-leading order soft-gluon corrections to top quark total and differential cross sections in hadron colliders. We increase the accuracy of our previous estimates by including additional subleading terms, including next-to-next-to-next-to-leading-logarithmic and some virtual terms. We show that the kinematics dependence of the cross section vanishes near threshold and is reduced away from it. The factorization and renormalization scale dependence of the cross section is also greatly reduced. We present results for the top quark total cross sections and transverse momentum distributions at the Tevatron and the LHC.