Production of a Z boson and two jets with one heavy-quark tag

We present a next-to-leading-order calculation of the production of a Z boson with two jets, one or more of which contains a heavy quark (Q=c,b). We show that the cross section with only one heavy-quark jet is larger than that with two heavy-quark jets at both the Fermilab Tevatron and the CERN LHC. These processes are the dominant irreducible backgrounds to a Higgs boson produced in association with a Z boson, followed by h->bb. Our calculation makes use of a heavy-quark distribution function, which resums collinear logarithms and makes the next-to-leading-order calculation tractable.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures. Erratum adde

Associated Production of a W Boson and One b Jet

We calculate the production of a W boson and a single b jet to next-to-leading order in QCD at the Fermilab Tevatron and the CERN Large Hadron Collider. Both exclusive and inclusive cross sections are presented. We separately consider the cross section for jets containing a single b quark and jets containing a b-anti b pair. There are a wide variety of processes that contribute, and it is necessary to include them all in order to have a complete description at both colliders.Comment: LaTeX, 16 pages, 22 postscript figures; version published in Phys. Rev.

Associated production of Higgs and single top at hadron colliders

We study the production of the Higgs boson in association with a single top quark at hadron colliders. The cross sections for the three production processes (t-channel, s-channel, and W-associated) at both the Tevatron and the LHC are presented. We investigate the possibility of detecting a signal for the largest of these processes, the t-channel process at the LHC, via the Higgs decay into b b-bar. The QCD backgrounds are large and difficult to curb, hindering the extraction of the signal. Extensions of our analysis to the production of supersymmetric Higgs bosons are also addressed. The cross section is enhanced for large values of tangent beta, increasing the prospects for extracting a signal