  We present the calculation of Next-to-Leading-Order Quantum Chromo Dynamics
corrections for the production of a W or Z weak boson associated with a bottom
anti-bottom quark pair at hadron colliders (p anti-p, pp to W/Z b anti-b),
including the effects of a non-zero bottom-quark mass. We find a considerable
reduction of the renormalization and factorization scale dependence of our
results with respect to Leading-Order calculations. In particular, we study the
impact of the corrections on the total cross section and invariant mass
distributions of the bottom anti-bottom quark pair at the Fermilab Tevatron
collider. We perform a detailed comparison with a calculation that considers
massless bottom quarks and find significant deviations in regions of phase
space with small invariant mass of the bottom anti-bottom quark pair. Our
results will be relevant to ongoing and future searches at hadron colliders, as
the W/Z b anti-b production mode is the main background to important signals,
such as light Standard Model Higgs boson production or single top-quark
production.
