Antenna subtraction for the production of heavy particles at hadron colliders

Abstract

The antenna subtraction method developed originally for the computation of higher order corrections to jet observables from a colourless initial state is extended for hadron collider processes involving a pair of massive particles and jets in the final state at the next-to-leading order (NLO) level. Due to the presence of coloured initial states, the subtraction terms need to be divided into three categories (final-final, initial-final and initial-initial). In this paper, we outline their construction and derive the necessary ingredients: phase space factorisation, antenna functions and also integrated antennae, including the effects of massive final states in all of those building parts. As a first application, we explicitly construct the colour-ordered real radiation and the corresponding antenna subtraction terms required at NLO for the production of a top quark pair and for the production of a top quark pair in association with a hard jet. The latter constitutes an essential ingredient for the computation of the hadronic production of a top-antitop pair at NNLO.