Boosted top production: factorization and resummation for single-particle inclusive distributions

Authors

Andrea Ferroglia, CUNY New York City College of TechnologyFollow
Simone Marzani, University of Durham
Ben D. Pecjak, University of Durham
Li Lin Yang, Peking University

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-8-2014

Abstract

We study single-particle inclusive (1PI) distributions in top-quark pair production at hadron colliders, working in the highly boosted regime where the top-quarkpTis much larger than its mass. In particular, we derive a novel factorization formula validin the small-mass and soft limits of the differential partonic cross section. This providesa framework for the simultaneous resummation of soft gluon corrections and small-mass logarithms, and also an efficient means of obtaining higher-order corrections to the differential cross section in this limit. The result involves five distinct one-scale functions, three of which arise through the subfactorization of soft real radiation in the small-mass limit. Welist the NNLO corrections to each of these functions, building on results in the literature by performing a new calculation of a soft function involving four light-like Wilson lines tothis order. We thus obtain a nearly complete description of the small-mass limit of the differential partonic cross section at NNLO near threshold,missing only terms involving closed top-quark loops in the virtual corrections.

Comments

This article was originally published in JHEP, available at doi:10.1007/JHEP01(2014)028.

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