Soft-gluon resummation for boosted top-quark production at hadron colliders

TL;DR

This paper develops a formalism for resumming soft gluon emissions in boosted top-quark pair production at hadron colliders, improving theoretical predictions for high invariant mass events.

Contribution

It introduces a factorization approach for the double soft and small-mass limit, enabling next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic resummation for differential cross sections.

Findings

Resummation of soft gluon corrections to NNLL accuracy.

Simplified calculation of delta-function terms at high invariant mass.

Enhanced theoretical precision for boosted top-quark production predictions.

Abstract

We investigate the production of highly energetic top-quark pairs at hadron colliders, focusing on the case where the invariant mass of the pair is much larger than the mass of the top quark. In particular, we set up a factorization formalism appropriate for describing the differential partonic cross section in the double soft and small-mass limit, and explain how to resum simultaneously logarithmic corrections arising from soft gluon emission and from the ratio of the pair-invariant mass to that of the top quark to next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy. We explore the implications of our results on approximate next-to-next-to-leading order formulas for the differential cross section in the soft limit, pointing out that they offer a simplified calculational procedure for determining the currently unknown delta-function terms in the limit of high invariant mass.