Secondary Heavy Quark Production in Jets through Mass Modes

TL;DR

This paper introduces an effective field theory approach to accurately account for secondary heavy quark effects in jet production, specifically applied to the thrust distribution in e+ e- collisions, by coherently separating different mass modes.

Contribution

It develops a novel field theoretic method using multiple effective theories to describe heavy quark mass effects across all kinematic regimes in jet production.

Findings

Provides a continuous description from heavy to light quark masses.

Maintains exact mass dependence of singular terms through factorization.

Applicable to both e+ e- collisions and hadron collisions.

Abstract

We present an effective field theory method to determine secondary massive quark effects in jet production taking the thrust distribution for e+ e- collisions in the dijet limit as a concrete example. The method is based on the field theoretic treatment of collinear and soft mass modes which have to be separated coherently from the collinear and ultrasoft modes related to massless quarks and gluons. For thrust the structure of the conceptual setup is closely related to the production of massive gauge bosons and involves four different effective field theories to describe all possible kinematic situations. The effective field theories merge into each other continuously and thus allow for a continuous description from infinitely heavy to arbitrarily small masses keeping the exact mass dependence of the most singular terms treated through factorization. The mass mode field theory method we present here is in the spirit of the variable fermion number scheme originally proposed by Aivazis, Collins, Olness and Tung and can also be applied in hadron collisions.