Production of Massive Color-Octet Vector Bosons at Next-to-Leading Order

We report the first complete calculation of QCD corrections to the production of a massive color-octet vector boson. Our next-to-leading-order (NLO) calculation includes both virtual corrections as well as corrections arising from the emission of gluons and light quarks, and we demonstrate the reduction in factorization-scale dependence relative to the leading-order approximation used in previous hadron collider studies. We show that the QCD NLO corrections to coloron production are as large as 30%, and that the residual factorization scale-dependence is reduced to of order 2%. We also calculate the K-factor and the p_T spectrum for coloron production, since these are valuable for comparison with experiment. Our results apply directly to the production of the massive color-octet vector bosons in axigluon, topcolor, and coloron models, and approximately to the production of KK gluons in extra-dimensional models or color-octet technivector mesons in technicolor models.