The Beam Thrust Cross Section for Drell-Yan at NNLL Order

TL;DR

This paper presents the first NNLL order resummation of beam thrust in Drell-Yan production at hadron colliders, providing a new method to study initial-state radiation and jet vetoes.

Contribution

It introduces the first NNLL resummation for a hadron collider event shape, enhancing the understanding of ISR effects in Drell-Yan processes.

Findings

Resummation at NNLL order for beam thrust in Drell-Yan.

Potential for experimental tests at Tevatron and LHC.

Improved modeling of initial-state radiation effects.

Abstract

At the LHC and Tevatron strong initial-state radiation (ISR) plays an important role. It can significantly affect the partonic luminosity available to the hard interaction or contaminate a signal with additional jets and soft radiation. An ideal process to study ISR is isolated Drell-Yan production, pp -> X l+l- without central jets, where the jet veto is provided by the hadronic event shape beam thrust tau_B. Most hadron collider event shapes are designed to study central jets. In contrast, requiring tau_B << 1 provides an inclusive veto of central jets and measures the spectrum of ISR. For tau_B << 1 we carry out a resummation of alpha_s^n ln^m tau_B corrections at next-to-next-to-leading-logarithmic order. This is the first resummation at this order for a hadron-hadron collider event shape. Measurements of tau_B at the Tevatron and LHC can provide crucial tests of our understanding of ISR and of tau_B's utility as a central jet veto.