Hadronic top-quark pair-production with one jet and parton showering

Abstract

We present a calculation of heavy-flavor production in hadronic collisions in association with one jet matched to parton shower Monte Carlo programs at next-to-leading order in perturbative QCD. Top-quark decays are included and spin correlations in the decay products are taken into account. The calculation builds on existing results for the radiative corrections to heavy-quark plus one jet production and uses the POWHEG BOX for the interface to the parton shower programs PYTHIA or HERWIG. A broad phenomenological study for the Large Hadron Collider and the Tevatron is presented. In particular we study---as one important sample application---the impact of the parton shower on the top-quark charge asymmetry.

38 pages, 14 figures, 6 tables. Few references and comments added. Version accepted for publication