THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES NEXT-TO-LEADING-ORDER CORRECTIONS TO WEAK BOSON PRODUCTION WITH A MASSIVE QUARK JET PAIR AT HADRON COLLIDERS By FERNANDO FEBRES CORDERO

We present the calculation of Next-to-Leading-Order Quantum Chromo Dynamics corrections for the production of a W or Z weak boson associated with a bottom anti-bottom quark pair at hadron colliders (pp̄, pp → W/Z bb̄), including the effects of a non-zero bottomquark mass. We find a considerable reduction of the renormalization and factorization scale dependence of our results with respect to Leading-Order calculations. In particular, we study the impact of the corrections on the total cross section and invariant mass distributions of the bottom anti-bottom quark pair at the Fermilab Tevatron pp collider. We perform a detailed comparison with a calculation that considers massless bottom quarks and find significant deviations in regions of phase space with small invariant mass of the bottom anti-bottom quark pair. Our results will be relevant to ongoing and future searches at hadron colliders, as the W/Z bb production mode is the main background to important signals, such as light Standard Model Higgs boson production or single top-quark production.