Soft-gluon and Coulomb corrections to hadronic top-quark pair production beyond NNLO

TL;DR

This paper develops a high-precision theoretical prediction for top-quark pair production at the LHC by including advanced soft-gluon and Coulomb corrections up to approximate N3LO, reducing uncertainties significantly.

Contribution

It introduces a novel resummation method at N3LL accuracy for top-quark pair production, incorporating Coulomb effects and estimating higher-order unknowns.

Findings

Approximate N3LO cross section with 1.5% correction.

Perturbative uncertainty reduced below ±5%.

Enhanced theoretical precision for LHC top-quark studies.

Abstract

We construct a resummation at partial next-to-next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy for hadronic top-quark pair production near partonic threshold, including simultaneously soft-gluon and Coulomb corrections, and use this result to obtain approximate next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order predictions for the total top-quark pair-production cross section at the LHC. We generalize a required one-loop potential in non-relativistic QCD to the colour-octet case and estimate the remaining unknown two-loop potentials and three-loop anomalous dimensions. We obtain a moderate correction of $1.5\%$ relative to the next-to-next-to-leading order prediction and observe a reduction of the perturbative uncertainty below $\pm 5\%$.