In this talk, I review the effective theory approach to unstable particle production and present results of a calculation of the process e- e+ ->mu- nubar_mu u dbar X near the W-pair production threshold up to next-to-leading order in GammaW/MW ~ alpha ~ v^2. The remaining theoretical uncertainty and the impact on the measurement of the W mass is discussed.
We illustrate the use of effective theory techniques to describe processes involving unstable particles close to resonance. First, we present the main ideas in the context of a scalar resonance in an Abelian gauge-Yukawa model. We then outline the necessary modifications to describe W-pair production close to threshold in electron-positron collisions.
We perform a dedicated study of the four-fermion production process e- e+ -> mu- nubar_mu u dbar X near the W pair-production threshold in view of the importance of this process for a precise measurement of the W boson mass. Accurate theoretical predictions for this process require a systematic treatment of finite-width effects. We use unstable-particle effective field theory (EFT) to perform an expansion in the coupling constants, GammaW/MW, and the non-relativistic velocity v of the W boson up to next-to-leading order in GammaW/MW ~ alpha_ew ~ v^2. We find that the dominant theoretical uncertainty in MW is currently due to an incomplete treatment of initial-state radiation. The remaining uncertainty of the NLO EFT calculation translates into delta MW ~ 10-15 MeV, and to about 5 MeV with additional input from the NLO four-fermion calculation in the full theory.
We calculate the parametrically dominant next-to-next-to-leading order corrections to four-fermion production e^- e^+ -> mu^- nubar_mu u dbar + X at centre-of-mass energies near the W-pair production threshold employing the method of unstable-particle effective theory. In total the correction is small, leading to a shift of 3 MeV in the W-mass measurement. We also discuss the implementation of realistic cuts and provide a result for the interference of single-Coulomb and soft radiative corrections that can easily be extended to include an arbitrary number of Coulomb photons.
We compute the third-order correction to the heavy-quark current correlation function due to the emission and absorption of an ultrasoft gluon. Our result supplies a missing contribution to top-quark pair production near threshold and the determination of the bottom quark mass from QCD sum rules.
We present new results on the NNNLO top-antitop production cross section near threshold from potential and ultrasoft gluon corrections. The new non-logarithmic third-order terms are in the 10% range and lead to a significant reduction in the theoretical error.