Top Quark Production at Hadron Colliders: an Overview

Abstract

The study of the properties of the top quark is one of the main goals of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) physics program. The experimental precision expected at the LHC requires the calculation of several top-quark related observables beyond leading order in the strong coupling constant. In this work we briefly review the status of the theoretical predictions for the top-quark production processes at hadron colliders. Special attention is devoted to recent progress in the calculation of next-to-next-to-leading-order corrections to the top-quark pair production cross section.

Submitted to the proceedings of "The 2009 Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics", July 16 - 22, 2009, Krakow, Poland. References added