Top quark pair production beyond NNLO

Abstract

We construct an approximate expression for the total cross section for the production of a heavy quark-antiquark pair in hadronic collisions at next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order (N[superscript 3]LO) in αs. We use a technique which exploits the analyticity of the Mellin space cross section, and the information on its singularity structure coming from large N (soft gluon, Sudakov) and small N (high energy, BFKL) all order resummations, previously introduced and used in the case of Higgs production. We validate our method by comparing to available exact results up to NNLO. We find that N[superscript 3]LO corrections increase the predicted top pair cross section at the LHC by about 4% over the NNLO.