No Arabic abstract
We investigate the production of highly energetic top-quark pairs at hadron colliders, focusing on the case where the invariant mass of the pair is much larger than the mass of the top quark. In particular, we set up a factorization formalism appropriate for describing the differential partonic cross section in the double soft and small-mass limit, and explain how to resum simultaneously logarithmic corrections arising from soft gluon emission and from the ratio of the pair-invariant mass to that of the top quark to next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy. We explore the implications of our results on approximate next-to-next-to-leading order formulas for the differential cross section in the soft limit, pointing out that they offer a simplified calculational procedure for determining the currently unknown delta-function terms in the limit of high invariant mass.
Incorporating all recent theoretical advances, we resum soft-gluon corrections to the total $tbar t$ cross-section at hadron colliders at the next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic (NNLL) order. We perform the resummation in the well established framework of Mellin $N$-space resummation. We exhaustively study the sources of systematic uncertainty like renormalization and factorization scale variation, power suppressed effects and missing two- and higher-loop corrections. The inclusion of soft-gluon resummation at NNLL brings only a minor decrease in the perturbative uncertainty with respect to the NLL approximation, and a small shift in the central value, consistent with the quoted uncertainties. These numerical predictions agree with the currently available measurements from the Tevatron and LHC and have uncertainty of similar size. We conclude that significant improvements in the $tbar t$ cross-sections can potentially be expected only upon inclusion of the complete NNLO corrections.
In ongoing and upcoming hadron collider experiments, top quark physics will play an important role in testing the Standard Model and its possible extensions. In this work we present analytic results for the differential cross sections of top quark pair production in hadronic collisions at next-to-leading order in the QCD coupling, keeping the full dependence on the spins of the top quarks. These results are combined with the corresponding next-to-leading order results for the decay of polarized top quarks into dilepton, lepton plus jets, and all jets final states. As an application we predict double differential angular distributions which are due to the QCD-induced top quark spin correlations in the intermediate state. In addition to the analytic results, we give numerical results in terms of fit functions that can easily be used in an experimental analysis.
We present a precision calculation of the transverse-momentum and invariant-mass distributions for supersymmetric particle pair production at hadron colliders, focusing on Drell-Yan like slepton pair and slepton-sneutrino associated production at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. We implement the joint resummation formalism at the next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy with a process-independent Sudakov form factor, thus ensuring a universal description of soft-gluon emission, and consistently match the obtained result with the pure perturbative result at the first order in the strong coupling constant, i.e. at O(alpha_s). We also implement three different recent parameterizations of non-perturbative effects. Numerically, we give predictions for ~e_R ~e_R^* production and compare the resummed cross section with the perturbative result. The dependence on unphysical scales is found to be reduced, and non-perturbative contributions remain small.
We review a Soft Collinear Effective Theory approach to the study of factorization and resummation of QCD effects in top-quark pair production. In particular, we consider differential cross sections such as the top-quark pair invariant mass distribution and the top-quark transverse momentum and rapidity distributions. Furthermore, we focus our attention on the large invariant mass and large transverse momentum kinematic regions, characteristic of boosted top quarks. We discuss the factorization of the differential cross section in the double soft gluon emission and small top-quark mass limit, both in Pair Invariant Mass (PIM) and One Particle Inclusive (1PI) kinematics. The factorization formulas can be employed in order to implement the simultaneous resummation of soft emission and small mass effects up to next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy. The results are also used to construct improved next-to-next-to-leading order approximations for the differential cross sections.
We consider QCD tbar{t}gamma and tbar{t}Z production at hadron colliders as a tool to measure the ttgamma and ttZ couplings. At the Tevatron it may be possible to perform a first, albeit not very precise, test of the ttgamma vector and axial vector couplings in tbar{t}gamma production, provided that more than 5 fb^{-1} of integrated luminosity are accumulated. The tbar{t}Z cross section at the Tevatron is too small to be observable. At the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) it will be possible to probe the ttgamma couplings at the few percent level, which approaches the precision which one hopes to achieve with a next-generation e^+e^- linear collider. The LHCs capability of associated QCD tbar{t}V (V=gamma, Z) production has the added advantage that the ttgamma and ttZ couplings are not entangled. For an integrated luminosity of 300 fb^{-1}, the ttZ vector (axial vector) coupling can be determined with an uncertainty of 45-85% (15-20%), whereas the dimension-five dipole form factors can be measured with a precision of 50-55%. The achievable limits improve typically by a factor of 2-3 for the luminosity-upgraded (3 ab^{-1}) LHC.