The QCD/HQET matching coefficient for the heavy-quark field is calculated up to four loops. It must be finite; this requirement produces analytical results for some terms in the four-loop on-shell heavy-quark field renormalization constant which were previously only known numerically. The effect of a non-zero lighter-flavor mass is calculated up to three loops. A class of on-shell integrals with two masses is analyzed in detail. By specifying our result to QED, we obtain the relation between the electron field and the Bloch--Nordsieck field with four-loop accuracy.
Processes of heavy quark production at HERA, TEVATRON and THERA energies are considered using the semihard ($k_T$ factorization) QCD approach with emphasis on the BFKL dynamics of gluon distributions.
We find the leading electro-weak corrections to the HQET/NRQCD Lagrangian. These corrections appear in the Wilson coefficients of the two and four quark operators and are considered here up to $mathcal{O}(1/m^3)$ at one-loop order. The two quark operators up to this order will include new CP-violating terms, which we derived analogously to the CP preserving QCD result at one-loop order.
Decoupling of c-quark loops in b-quark HQET is considered. The decoupling coefficients for the HQET heavy-quark field and the heavy-light quark current are calculated with the three-loop accuracy. The last result can be used to improve the accuracy of extracting f_B from HQET lattice simulations (without c-quark loops). The decoupling coefficient for the flavour-nonsinglet QCD current with n antisymmetrized gamma-matrices is also obtained at three loops; the result for the tensor current (n=2) is new.
It is well known that the effect of top quark loop corrections in the axial part of quark form factors (FF) does not decouple in the large top mass or low energy limit due to the presence of the axial-anomaly type diagrams. The top-loop induced singlet-type contribution should be included in addition to the purely massless result for quark FFs when applied to physics in the low energy region, both for the non-decoupling mass logarithms and for an appropriate renormalization scale dependence. In this work, we have numerically computed the so-called singlet contribution to quark FFs with the exact top quark mass dependence over the full kinematic range. We discuss in detail the renormalization formulae of the individual subsets of the singlet contribution to an axial quark FF with a particular flavor, as well as the renormalization group equations that govern their individual scale dependence. Finally we have extracted the 3-loop Wilson coefficient in the low energy effective Lagrangian, renormalized in a non-$overline{mathrm{MS}}$ scheme and constructed to encode the leading large mass approximation of our exact results for singlet quark FFs. We have also examined the accuracy of the approximation in the low energy region.
We study the phase structure of lattice QCD with heavy quarks at finite temperature and density by a histogram method. We determine the location of the critical point at which the first-order deconfining transition in the heavy-quark limit turns into a crossover at intermediate quark masses through a change of the shape of the histogram under variation of coupling parameters. We estimate the effect of the complex phase factor which causes the sign problem at finite density, and show that, in heavy-quark QCD, the effect is small around the critical point. We determine the critical surface in 2+1 flavor QCD in the heavy-quark region at all values of the chemical potential mu including mu=infty.