QCD resummations for boosted top production

TL;DR

This paper develops advanced QCD resummation techniques for boosted top-quark pair production, improving theoretical predictions of key distributions by incorporating soft and small-mass logarithms at NNLL' order, and matching with fixed-order results.

Contribution

It introduces a joint resummation formalism at NNLL' order for boosted top production, combining soft and small-mass logarithms with fixed-order calculations for comprehensive phase space coverage.

Findings

Resummation significantly improves agreement with experimental data.

The formalism accounts for large corrections in the boosted regime.

Matching with fixed-order calculations extends validity across phase space.

Abstract

We present new results for QCD corrections to the top-pair invariant mass and top-quark $p_T$ distributions in boosted top-quark pair production at hadron colliders. They are derived from a formalism which allows the joint resummation of soft and small-mass logarithms at NNLL$'$ order, thus taking into account all potentially large corrections in the boosted regime, where the partonic center-of-mass energy is parameterically much larger than the mass of the top quark. We match these results with those from standard soft-gluon resummation away from the small-mass limit to NNLL order and also with NLO fixed-order calculations, so that our results are valid in the maximum possible range of phase space. The resummation effects on the $p_T$ and top-pair invariant mass distributions are significant, bringing theory predictions into better agreement with experimental data compared to pure NLO calculations.