Effects of QCD Resummation on Distributions of Top--Antitop Quark Pairs Produced at the Tevatron

Abstract

We study the kinematic distributions of top--antitop quark pairs produced at the Tevatron, including the effects of initial state and final state multiple soft gluon emission, using the Collins--Soper--Sterman resummation formalism. The resummed results are compared with those predicted by the showering event generator PYTHIA for various distributions involving the top--antitop quark pair and the individual top quark or antiquark. The comparison between the experimental and predicted distributions will be a strong test of our understanding and application of perturbative QCD. Our results indicate that the showering event generators do not produce enough radiation. We reweight the PYTHIA distributions to agree with our resummed calculation, then use the reweighted events to better estimate the true hadronic activity in top--antitop quark pair production at hadron colliders.