Three-loop soft function for energetic electroweak boson production at hadron colliders

Journal of High Energy Physics

Maximilian Stahlhofen¹  Ze Long Liu² 

[1] Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Physikalisches Institut, D-79104, Freiburg, Germany;PRISMA+ Cluster of Excellence & Mainz Institute for Theoretical Physics, Johannes Gutenberg University, 55099, Mainz, Germany;Theoretical Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, 87545, Los Alamos, NM, USA;

关键词: Effective Field Theories;    Perturbative QCD;    Renormalization Group;    Resummation;   

DOI  :  10.1007/JHEP02(2021)128

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

We calculate the three-loop soft function for the production of an electroweak boson (Higgs, γ, W±, Z) with large transverse momentum at a hadron collider. It is the first time a soft function for a three-parton process is computed at next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order (N3LO). As a technical novelty, we perform the calculation in terms of forward-scattering-type loop diagrams rather than evaluating phase space integrals. Our three-loop result contains color-tripole contributions and explicitly confirms predictions on the universal infrared structure of QCD scattering amplitudes with three massless parton legs. The soft function is a central ingredient in the factorized cross section for electroweak boson production near the kinematic endpoint (threshold), where the invariant mass of the recoiling hadronic radiation is small compared to its transverse momentum. Our result is required for predictions of the near-threshold cross sections at N3LO and for the resummation of threshold logarithms at primed next-to-next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic (N3LL′) accuracy.

【 授权许可】

CC BY