No Arabic abstract
We describe an implementation of a subtraction scheme in the nonrelativistic-QCD treatment of heavy-quarkonium production at next-to-leading-order in the strong-coupling constant, covering $S$- and $P$-wave bound states. It is based on the dipole subtraction in the massless version by Catani and Seymour and its extension to massive quarks by Phaf and Weinzierl. Important additions include the treatment of heavy-quark bound states, in particular due to the more complicated infrared-divergence structure in the case of $P$-wave states.
I describe a subtraction scheme for the next-to-next-to-leading order calculation of single inclusive production at hadron colliders. Such processes include Drell-Yan, W^{+/-}, Z and Higgs Boson production. The key to such a calculation is a treatment of initial state radiation which preserves the production characteristics, such as the rapidity distribution, of the process involved. The method builds upon the Dipole Formalism and, with proper modifications, could be applied to deep inelastic scattering and e^+ e^- annihilation to hadrons.
Deep inelastic scattering (DIS) total cross section data at small-x as measured by the HERA experiments is well described by Balitsky-Kovchegov (BK) evolution in the leading order dipole picture. Recently the full Next-to-Leading Order (NLO) dipole picture total cross sections have become available for DIS, and a working factorization scheme has been devised which subtracts the soft gluon divergence present at NLO. We report our recently published work in which we make the first comparisons of the NLO DIS total cross sections to HERA data. The non-perturbative initial condition to BK evolution is fixed by fitting the HERA reduced cross section data. As the NLO results for the DIS total cross section are currently available only in the massless quark limit, we also fit a light-quark-only cross section constructed with a parametrization of published total and heavy quark data. We find an excellent description of the HERA data. Since the full NLO BK equation is computationally expensive, we use a number of beyond LO prescriptions for the evolution that include most important higher order corrections enhanced by large transverse logarithms, including the recent version of the equation formulated in terms of the target momentum fraction.
We compute the hydrodynamic relaxation times $tau_pi$ and $tau_j$ for hot QCD at next-to-leading order in the coupling with kinetic theory. We show that certain dimensionless ratios of second-order to first-order transport coefficients obey bounds which apply whenever a kinetic theory description is possible; the computed values lie somewhat above these bounds. Strongly coupled theories with holographic duals strongly violate these bounds, highlighting their distance from a quasiparticle description.
We calculate the cross section of diffractive dijet photoproduction in $ep$ scattering at next-to-leading order (NLO) of perturbative QCD (pQCD), which we supplement by a model of factorization breaking for the resolved-photon contribution. In this model, the suppression depends on the flavor and momentum fraction of the partons in the photon. We show that within experimental and theoretical uncertainties, the resulting approach provides a good description of the available HERA data in most of the bins. Hence, taken together with the observation that NLO pQCD explains well the data on diffractive photoproduction of open charm in $ep$ scattering, our model of factorization breaking presents a viable alternative to the scheme based on the global suppression factor.
We present new sets of fragmentation functions in next-to-leading order QCD that are determined from e+e- annihilation data of inclusive particle production. In addition to the O(alpha_s) unpolarized cross section the longitudinal cross section is also used to extract the gluon fragmentation function from e+e- annihilation data. As the O(alpha_s) vanishes for longitudinal polarized photons (or Z bosons), the O(alpha_s^2) corrections are required to reduce the scale ambiguities. Recently, P.J. Rijken and W.L. van Neerven presented the longitudinal coefficient functions to next-to-leading order. We confirm part of their results in this thesis and complete the calculation by the results for the color class C_F*T_R that must be included for a consistent comparison with LEP1 data. The complete set of coefficient functions is then used together with novel data from ALEPH to determine the fragmentation functions for charged hadrons. This set, and also sets for charged pions, kaons, and D^* mesons as well as neutral kaons published previously, can then be employed to test QCD in e+e- annihilation, photoproduction, gamma-gamma collisions, p-p_bar scattering and DIS. Finally, we suggest how the improved knowledge on the fragmentation in particular of the gluon could be used to determine the gluon and charm content of the photon.