Percent-Level-Precision Physics at the Tevatron: Next-to-Next-to-Leading Order QCD Corrections to<mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><mml:mi>q</mml:mi><mml:mover accent="true"><mml:mi>q</mml:mi><mml:mo>¯</mml:mo></mml:mover><mml:mo>→</mml:mo><mml:mi>t</mml:mi><mml:mover accent="true"><mml:mi>t</mml:mi><mml:mo>¯</mml:mo></mml:mover><mml:mo mathvariant="bold">+</mml:mo><mml:mi>X</mml:mi></mml:math>

We compute the next-to-next-to-leading order QCD corrections to the partonic reaction that dominates top-pair production at the Tevatron. This is the first ever next-to-next-to-leading order calculation of an observable with more than two colored partons and/or massive fermions at hadron colliders. Augmenting our fixed order calculation with soft-gluon resummation through next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy, we observe that the predicted total inclusive cross section exhibits a very small perturbative uncertainty, estimated at ±2.7%. We expect that once all subdominant partonic reactions are accounted for, and work in this direction is ongoing, the perturbative theoretical uncertainty for this observable could drop below ±2%. Our calculation demonstrates the power of our computational approach and proves it can be successfully applied to all processes at hadron colliders for which high-precision analyses are needed.

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