NLO QCD corrections to W boson production with a massive b-quark jet pair at the Fermilab Tevatron pp̄ collider

We calculate the next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD corrections to Wbb̄ production including full bottom-quark mass effects. We study the impact of NLO QCD corrections on the total cross section and invariant mass distribution of the bottom-quark jet pair at the Fermilab Tevatron pp̄ collider. We perform a detailed comparison with a calculation that considers massless bottom quarks. We find that neglecting bottom-quark mass effects overestimates the NLO total cross section for Wbb̄ production at the Tevatron by about 8% independent of the choice of renormalization and factorization scale.