Threshold expansion of massive coloured particle cross sections

TL;DR

This paper develops a framework to sum large radiative corrections in the production of massive coloured particles near threshold, improving cross section predictions relevant for collider experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a method combining soft-collinear and non-relativistic effective theories to resum threshold corrections for massive coloured particle production.

Findings

Resummation improves the accuracy of top quark production cross sections.

The framework can be applied to other massive coloured particles.

Enhanced predictions are relevant for collider phenomenology.

Abstract

Pair production of massive coloured particles in hadron collisions is accompanied by potentially large radiative corrections related to the suppression of soft gluon emission and enhanced Coulomb exchange near the production threshold. We recently developed a framework to sum both series of corrections for the partonic cross section using soft-collinear and non-relativistic effective theory. If it can be argued that the resummed cross section approximates the complete result over a significant kinematic range, an improvement of the hadronic cross section results, even when the production is not kinematically constrained to the threshold. This is discussed here for the case of top quark production.