Hadronic top-quark pair production in association with a hard jet at next-to-leading order QCD: phenomenological studies for the Tevatron and the LHC

We report on the calculation of the next-to-leading order QCD corrections to the production of top–antitop-quark pairs in association with a hard jet at the Tevatron and at the LHC. Results for integrated and differential cross sections are presented. We find a significant reduction of the scale dependence. In most cases the corrections are below 20% indicating that the perturbative expansion is well under control. Moreover, the forward–backward charge asymmetry of the top quark, which is analyzed at the Tevatron, is studied at next-to-leading order. We find large corrections, suggesting that the definition of the observable has to be refined