Automation of antenna subtraction in colour space: gluonic processes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new, process-independent method for NNLO QCD calculations using antenna subtraction in colour space, demonstrated through gluonic three-jet production.

Contribution

The authors develop a general, automatable antenna subtraction scheme in colour space for NNLO QCD calculations, enabling systematic and process-independent infrared divergence subtraction.

Findings

Successfully computed the full colour NNLO correction to gluonic three-jet production

Demonstrated the method's applicability to gluonic processes at NNLO

Provided a systematic approach for virtual and real subtraction terms

Abstract

We present the colourful antenna subtraction method, a reformulation of the antenna subtraction scheme for next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) calculations in QCD. The aim of this new approach is to achieve a general and process-independent construction of the subtraction infrastructure at NNLO. We rely on the predictability of the infrared singularity structure of one- and two-loop amplitudes in colour space to generate virtual subtraction terms and, subsequently, we define an automatable procedure to systematically infer the expression of the real subtraction terms, guided by the correspondence between unintegrated and integrated antenna functions. To demonstrate the applicability of the described approach, we compute the full colour NNLO correction to gluonic three-jet production $pp(gg)\to ggg$, in the gluons-only assumption.