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.
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.
Unstable particles are notorious in perturbative quantum field theory for producing singular propagators in scattering amplitudes that require regularization by the finite width. In this review I discuss the construction of an effective field theory for unstable particles, based on the hierarchy of scales between the mass, M, and the width,Gamma, of the unstable particle that allows resonant processes to be systematically expanded in powers of the coupling alpha and Gamma/M, thereby providing gauge-invariant approximations at every order. I illustrate the method with the next-to-leading order line-shape of a scalar resonance in an abelian gauge-Yukawa model, and results on NLO and dominant NNLO corrections to (resonant and non-resonant) pair production of W-bosons and top quarks.
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 study the effect of the resummation of logarithms for tbar{t} production near threshold and inclusive electromagnetic decays of heavy quarkonium. This analysis is complete at next-to-next-to-leading order and includes the full resummation of logarithms at next-to-leading-logarithmic accuracy and some partial contributions at next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy. Compared with fixed-order computations at next-to-next-to-leading order the scale dependence and convergence of the perturbative series is greatly improved for both the position of the peak and the normalization of the total cross section. Nevertheless, we identify a possible source of large scale dependence in the result. At present we estimate the remaining theoretical uncertainty of the normalization of the total cross section to be of the order of 10% and for the position of the peak of the order of 100 MeV.
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.