  We present total and differential cross sections for W b anti-b and Z b
anti-b production at the CERN Large Hadron Collider with a center-of-mass
energy of 14 TeV, including Next-to-Leading Order (NLO) QCD corrections and
full bottom-quark mass effects. We also provide numerical results obtained with
a center-of-mass energy of 10 TeV. We study the scale uncertainty of the total
cross sections due to the residual renormalization- and factorization-scale
dependence of the truncated perturbative series. While in the case of Z b
anti-b production the scale uncertainty of the total cross section is reduced
by NLO QCD corrections, the W b anti-b production process at NLO in QCD still
suffers from large scale uncertainties, in particular in the inclusive case. We
also perform a detailed comparison with a calculation that considers massless
bottom quarks, as implemented in the Monte Carlo program MCFM. The effects of a
non-zero bottom-quark mass (m_b) cannot be neglected in phase-space regions
where the relevant kinematic observable, such as the transverse momentum of the
bottom quarks or the invariant mass of the bottom-quark pair, are of the order
of m_b. The effects on the total production cross sections are usually smaller
than the residual scale uncertainty at NLO in QCD.
