The production of bottom-flavoured jets at the LHC through bottom-quark pair production at NNLO+PS

Abstract

We consider the dominant production mechanism of bottom-flavoured jets at the LHC, which proceeds through bottom-quark pair production. We compute next-to-next-to- leading-order (NNLO) QCD corrections retaining full bottom-quark mass effects and match them with a parton shower (NNLO+PS). Our predictions provide a realistic description of events with one and two bottom-flavoured jets at both the partonic and hadronic level. We compare different jet-flavour definitions and confirm that the dominant numerical differences between the jet algorithms result from the treatment of jets that contain two bottom quarks originating from $g\to b\bar b$ splittings. We compare our predictions, using the experimental bottom-flavour tagging prescription, with measurements by ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb at 7 and 13 TeV, finding good agreement for the distributions presented by ATLAS and CMS and a good description of the shapes of the LHCb data. We also discuss the impact of various physics effects on the considered distributions: power corrections in the bottom-quark mass, the implications of symmetric/asymmetric jet-selection cuts, as well as contributions from multi-parton interactions.