Heavy-flavor hadro-production with heavy-quark masses renormalized in the MS ¯ $$ \overline{\mathrm{MS}} $$ , MSR and on-shell schemes

We present predictions for heavy-quark production at the Large Hadron Collider making use of the $$ \overline{\mathrm{MS}} $$ and MSR renormalization schemes for the heavy-quark mass as alternatives to the widely used on-shell renormalization scheme. We compute single and double differential distributions including QCD corrections at next-to-leading order and investigate the renormalization and factorization scale dependence as well as the perturbative convergence in these mass renormalization schemes. The implementation is based on publicly available programs, MCFM and xFitter, extending their capabilities. Our results are applied to extract the top-quark mass using measurements of the total and differential $$ t\overline{t} $$ production cross-sections and to investigate constraints on parton distribution functions, especially on the gluon distribution at low x values, from available LHC data on heavy-flavor hadro-production.