The combination of collinear factorization with effective field theory originally developed for soft interactions of heavy quarks provides the foundations of the theory of exclusive and semi-inclusive B decays. In this article I summarize some of the
later conceptual developments of the so-called QCD factorization approach that make use of soft-collinear effective theory. Then I discuss the status and results of the calculation of the hard-scattering functions at the next order, and review very briefly some of the phenomenology, covering aspects of charmless, electroweak penguin and radiative (semi-leptonic) decays.
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 describe the computation of the one-loop muon anomalous magnetic moment and radiative penguin transitions in the minimal and custodially protected Randall-Sundrum model. A fully five-dimensional (5D) framework is employed to match the 5D theory on
to the Standard Model extended by dimension-six operators. The additional contribution to the anomalous magnetic moment from the gauge-boson exchange contributions is Delta a_mu approx 8.8 (27.2) x 10^(-11) x (1 TeV/T)^2, where the first (second) number refers to the minimal (custodially-protected) model. Here $1/T$ denotes the location of the TeV brane in conformal coordinates, and is related to the mass of the lowest gauge-boson KK excitation by M_KK approx 2.35 T. We also determine the Higgs-exchange contribution, which depends on the 5D Yukawa structure and the precise interpretation of the localisation of the Higgs field near or at the TeV brane.
We present results for the total top-pair production cross section at the Tevatron and the LHC. Our predictions supplement fixed-order results with resummation of soft logarithms and Coulomb singularities to next-to-next-to-leading (NNLL) logarithmic
accuracy and include top-antitop bound-state effects. The effects of resummation, the dependence on the PDF set used, the residual sources of theoretical uncertainty and their implication for measurements of the top-quark mass are discussed.
We discuss various aspects of inclusive top-quark pair production based on TOPIXS, a new, flexible program that computes the production cross section at the Tevatron and LHC at next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy in soft and Coulomb resummat
ion, including bound-state effects and the complete next-to-next-to-leading order result in the q-qbar channel, which has recently become available. We present the calculation of the top-pair cross section in pp collisions at 8 TeV centre-of-mass energy, as well as the cross sections for hypothetical heavy quarks in extensions of the standard model. The dependence on the parton distribution input is studied. Further we investigate the impact of LHC top cross section measurements at sqrt(s)=7 TeV on global fits of the gluon distribution using the NNPDF re-weighting method.
We present predictions for the total top-quark pair production cross section at the Tevatron and the LHC with 7,8 and 14 TeV centre-of-mass energy, including the resummation of threshold logarithms and Coulomb corrections through next-to-next-to-lead
ing logarithmic order, and top-antitop bound-state contributions. The remaining theoretical and PDF uncertainties and prospects for the measurement of the top mass from the total cross section are discussed.
We present predictions for the total ttbar production cross section sigma_ttbar at the Tevatron and LHC, which include the resummation of soft logarithms and Coulomb singularities through next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic order, and ttbar bound-sta
te contributions. Resummation effects amount to about 8 % of the next-to-leading order result at Tevatron and about 3 % at LHC with 7 TeV centre-of-mass energy. They lead to a significant reduction of the theoretical uncertainty. With m_t=173.3 GeV, we find sigma_ttbar=7.22^{+0.31+0.71}_{-0.47-0.55} pb at Tevatron and sigma_ttbar=162.6^{+7.4+15.4}_{-7.5-14.7} at the LHC, in good agreement with the latest experimental measurements.
We compute the total top-quark pair production cross section at the Tevatron and LHC based on approximate NNLO results, and on the summation of threshold logarithms and Coulomb enhancements to all orders with next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic (NNLL
) accuracy, including bound-state effects. We find sigma_{tbar t} = 7.22^{+0.31+0.71}_{-0.47-0.55} pb at Tevatron and sigma_{tbar t} = 162.6^{+7.4+15.4}_{-7.6-14.7} pb at LHC with 7 TeV c.o.m. energy, for m_t=173.3 GeV. The implementation of joint soft and Coulomb resummation, its ambiguities, and the present theoretical uncertainty are discussed in detail. We further obtain new approximate results at N3LO.
We consider electroweak symmetry breaking by a certain class of non-local Higgs sectors. Extending previous studies employing the Mandelstam condition, a straight Wilson line is used to make the Higgs action gauge invariant. We show the unitarization
of vector-boson scattering for a wide class of non-local actions, but find that the Wilson-line model leads to tree-level corrections to electroweak precision observables, which restrict the parameter space of the model. We also find that Unhiggs models cannot address the hierarchy problem, once the parameters are expressed in terms of low-energy observables.
Pair production of massive coloured particles in hadron collisions is accompanied by potentially large radiative corrections related to the suppression of soft gluon emission and enhanced Coulomb exchange near the production threshold. We recently de
veloped a framework to sum both series of corrections for the partonic cross section using soft-collinear and non-relativistic effective theory. If it can be argued that the resummed cross section approximates the complete result over a significant kinematic range, an improvement of the hadronic cross section results, even when the production is not kinematically constrained to the threshold. This is discussed here for the case of top quark production.
