Soft-gluon Resummation for High-pT Inclusive-Hadron Production at COMPASS

TL;DR

This paper investigates the impact of resumming large logarithmic threshold corrections in high-pT inclusive-hadron production at COMPASS, demonstrating improved agreement between theoretical predictions and experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a next-to-leading order resummation of threshold logarithms for high-pT hadron production in photoproduction, enhancing theoretical accuracy.

Findings

Threshold resummation significantly improves data-theory agreement.

Large logarithmic corrections are crucial at high transverse momentum.

Resummation reduces theoretical uncertainties.

Abstract

We study the cross section for the photoproduction reaction gamma N -> h X in fixed-target scattering at COMPASS, where the hadron h is produced at large transverse momentum. We investigate the role played by higher-order QCD corrections to the cross section. In particular we address large logarithmic "threshold" corrections to the rapidity dependent partonic cross sections, which we resum to all orders at next-to-leading accuracy. In our comparison to the experimental data we find that the threshold contributions are large and improve the agreement between data and theoretical predictions significantly.