W- and Z-boson production with a massive bottom-quark pair at the large hadron collider

We present total and differential cross sections for Wbb̄ and Zbb̄ production at the CERN Large Hadron Collider with a center-of-mass energy of s=14TeV, including next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD corrections and full bottom-quark mass effects. We also provide numerical results obtained with a center-of-mass energy of s=10TeV. We study the scale uncertainty of the total cross sections due to the residual renormalization- and factorization-scale dependence of the truncated perturbative series. While in the case of Zbb̄ production the scale uncertainty of the total cross section is reduced by NLO QCD corrections, the Wbb̄ production process at NLO in QCD still suffers from large scale uncertainties, in particular, in the inclusive case. We also perform a detailed comparison with a calculation that considers massless bottom quarks, as implemented in the MonteCarlo program MCFM. The effects of a nonzero bottom-quark mass (mb) cannot be neglected in phase-space regions where the relevant kinematic observable, such as the transverse-momentum of the bottom quarks or the invariant-mass of the bottom-quark pair, are of the order of mb. The effects on the total production cross sections are usually smaller than the residual scale uncertainty at NLO in QCD.