Higher-order soft and Coulomb corrections to squark and gluino production at the LHC

We present predictions for the total cross sections for pair production of squarks and gluinos at the LHC including a combined NNLL resummation of soft and Coulomb gluon effects. The NNLL corrections can be up to 25% relative to previous NLL results and reduce the theoretical uncertainties to the 10% level.

Production-decay interferences at NLO in QCD for t-channel single-top production

We present a calculation of O(alpha_s) contributions to the process of t-channel single-top production and decay, which include virtual and real corrections arising from interference of the production and decay subprocesses. The calculation is organized as a simultaneous expansion of the matrix elements in the couplings alpha_{ew},alpha_s and the virtuality of the intermediate top quark, (p_t^2-m_t^2)/m_t^2 ~ Gamma_t/m_t, and extends earlier results beyond the narrow-width approximation.

Resonant particle production at hadron colliders

We present a method to compute off-shell effects for processes involving resonant particles at hadron colliders with the possibility to include realistic cuts on the decay products. The method is based on an effective theory approach to unstable particle production and, as an example, is applied to t-channel single top production at the LHC.

Colour structure in threshold resummation and squark-antisquark production at NLL

We consider the resummation of soft and Coulomb gluons for pair-production processes of heavy coloured particles at hadron colliders, and discuss recent results on the construction of a basis in colour space that diagonalizes the soft function to all orders in perturbation theory and the determination of the two-loop soft anomalous dimension needed for NNLL resummations. We present results for the combined NLL resummation of soft gluon and Coulomb-gluon effects for squark-antisquark production at the LHC.

Four-fermion production near the W pair production threshold

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.

BFKL at Next-to-Next-to-Leading Order

We determine an approximate expression for the O(alpha_s^3) contribution chi_2 to the kernel of the BFKL equation, which includes all collinear and anticollinear singular contributions. This is derived using recent results on the relation between the GLAP and BFKL kernels (including running-coupling effects to all orders) and on small-x factorization schemes. We present the result in various schemes, relevant both for applications to the BFKL equation and to small-x evolution of parton distributions.