Four fermion soft emission in QCD hard scattering

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the complex soft emission patterns of two distinguishable quark-antiquark pairs in QCD scattering, revealing non-abelian effects, charge asymmetries, and extensions to QED interactions.

Contribution

It provides a detailed tree-level calculation of soft current for two distinguishable quark-antiquark pairs, including non-abelian and abelian terms, and extends to QED and mixed emissions.

Findings

Identifies color dipole and tripole interactions in soft emissions.

Reveals charge asymmetry effects due to non-abelian interactions.

Extends analysis to include QED and mixed lepton-quark emissions.

Abstract

We consider the radiation of two distinguishable soft quark-antiquark pairs ($\mathrm{q}\bar{\mathrm{q}}\mathrm{Q}\bar{\mathrm{Q}}$) in a generic process for multiparton hard scattering in QCD. We evaluate the corresponding soft current at tree level in terms of an independent-emission contribution and an irreducible correlation component, which includes strictly non-abelian terms and also terms with an abelian character. The squared current for soft $\mathrm{q}\bar{\mathrm{q}}\mathrm{Q}\bar{\mathrm{Q}}$ emission produces colour dipole and colour tripole interactions between the hard-scattering partons, with structures similar to soft gluon-quark-antiquark emission. The colour tripole interactions are odd under charge conjugation and lead to charge asymmetry effects. We extend our analysis by including QED interactions, the emission of two distinguishable soft lepton-antilepton pairs, and mixed quark-antiquark-lepton-antilepton soft emission.