No Arabic abstract
This paper is a slightly modified version of the introductory part of a doctoral dissertation also containing the articles hep-ph/0311268, hep-ph/0510375, hep-ph/0512177 and hep-ph/0701250. The thesis discusses effective field theory methods, in particular dimensional reduction, in the context of finite temperature field theory. We first briefly review the formalism of thermal field theory and show how dimensional reduction emerges as the high-temperature limit for static quantities. Then we apply dimensional reduction to two distinct problems, the pressure of electroweak theory and the screening masses of mesonic operators in hot QCD, and point out the similarities. We summarize the results and discuss their validity, while leaving all details to original research articles.
We review the current state-of-the-art in integrand level reduction for five-point scattering amplitudes at two loops in QCD. We present some benchmark results for the evaluation of the leading colour two-loop five-gluon amplitudes in the physical region as well as the partonic channels for two quarks and three gluons and four quarks and one gluon.
Various thermodynamic quantities for baryon-free matter are calculated by combining the most reliable non-perturbative and perturbative calculations, especially the most recent ones including as many quark flavors as possible. We extend these calculations by including other degrees of freedom (dof), such as photons, neutrinos, leptons, electroweak particles, and Higgs bosons, that allows us to consider the temperatures up to the TeV-scale. The calculations show that similar to QCD, the EW phase transition is also a crossover. We have found that while the equation of state for the hadronic matter is linear, $p/rhosimeq 0.2$, the one for higher temperatures is rather complex; it exhibits two crossover-type phase transitions, corresponding to strong and EW matter. At even larger energy densities, the deduced EoS becomes linear again and close to ideal gas. The combined equation of state can be used for modeling the expansion of the Universe from very early times and through the EW and QCD era.
We discuss the difference between n-dimensional regularization and n-dimensional reduction for processes in QCD which have an additional mass scale. Examples are heavy flavour production in hadron-hadron collisions or on-shell photon-hadron collisions where the scale is represented by the mass $m$. Another example is electroproduction of heavy flavours where we have two mass scales given by $m$ and the virtuality of the photon $Q=sqrt{-q^2}$. Finally we study the Drell-Yan process where the additional scale is represented by the virtuality $Q=sqrt{q^2}$ of the vector boson ($gamma^*, W, Z$). The difference between the two schemes is not accounted for by the usual oversubtractions. There are extra counter terms which multiply the mass scale dependent parts of the Born cross sections. In the case of the Drell-Yan process it turns out that the off-shell mass regularization agrees with n-dimensional regularization.
The relevance of single-W and single-Z production processes at hadron colliders is well known: in the present paper the status of theoretical calculations of Drell-Yan processes is summarized and some results on the combination of electroweak and QCD corrections to a sample of observables of the process $p p to W^pm to mu^pm + X$ at the LHC are discussed. The phenomenological analysis shows that a high-precision knowledge of QCD and a careful combination of electroweak and strong contributions is mandatory in view of the anticipated LHC experimental accuracy. One of the authors (O.N.) dedicates these notes to Prof. S. Jadach, in honour of his 60th birthday and grateful for all that Prof. Jadach taught him during their fruitful collaboration.
Nonperturbative QCD corrections are important to many low-energy electroweak observables, for example the muon magnetic moment. However, hadronic corrections also play a significant role at much higher energies due to their impact on the running of standard model parameters, such as the electromagnetic coupling. Currently, these hadronic contributions are accounted for by a combination of experimental measurements, effective field theory techniques and phenomenological modeling but ideally should be calculated from first principles. Recent developments indicate that many of the most important hadronic corrections may be feasibly calculated using lattice QCD methods. To illustrate this, we will examine the lattice computation of the leading-order QCD corrections to the muon magnetic moment, paying particular attention to a recently developed method but also reviewing the results from other calculations. We will then continue with several examples that demonstrate the potential impact of the new approach: the leading-order corrections to the electron and tau magnetic moments, the running of the electromagnetic coupling, and a class of the next-to-leading-order corrections for the muon magnetic moment. Along the way, we will mention applications to the Adler function, which can be used to determine the strong coupling constant, and QCD corrections to muonic-hydrogen.