Inclusive top-pair production phenomenology with TOPIXS

Abstract

We discuss various aspects of inclusive top-quark pair production based on Topixs, a new, flexible program that computes the production cross section at the Teva-tron and LHC at next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy in soft and Coulomb re-summation, including bound-state effects and the complete next-to-next-to-leading order result in the qq channel, which has recently become available. We present the calculation of the top-pair cross section in pp collisions at 8 TeV centre-of-mass energy, as well as the cross sections for hypothetical heavy quarks in extensions of the standard model. The dependence on the parton distribution input is studied. Further we investigate the impact of LHC top cross section measurements at √s = 7 TeV on global fits of the gluon distribution using the NNPDF re-weighting method. © 2012 SISSA.