Emanuele Bagnaschi (DESY), Fabio Maltoni (Louvain U., CP3), Alessandro Vicini (Milan U. and INFN, Milan), Marco Zaro (NIKHEF, Amsterdam and Paris, LPTHE)
e-Print: 1803.04336 [hep-ph]
We perform a study of lepton-pair production in association with bottom quarks at the LHC based on the predictions obtained at next-to-leading order in QCD, both at fixed order and matched with a QCD parton shower. We consider a comprehensive set of observables and estimate the associated theoretical uncertainties by studying the dependence on the perturbative QCD scales (renormalisation, factorisation and shower) and by comparing different parton-shower models (${\tt Pythia8}$ and ${\tt Herwig++}$) and matching schemes (${\tt MC@NLO}$ and ${\tt POWHEG}$). Based on these results, we propose a simple procedure to include bottom-quark effects in neutral-current Drell-Yan production, going beyond the standard massless approximation. Focusing on the inclusive lepton-pair transverse-momentum distribution ${p}_{\perp}^{\ell^{+}\ell -}$, we quantify the impact of such effects on the tuning of the simulation of charged-current Drell-Yan observables and the W-boson mass determination.