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Thomas Becher

Publications and source records attributed to Thomas Becher.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
arXiv2018

Non-global logarithms in jet and isolation cone cross sections

Starting from a factorization theorem in effective field theory, we derive a parton-shower equation for the resummation of non-global logarithms. We have implemented this shower and interfaced it with a tree-level event generator to obtain an automated framework to resum the leading logarithm of non-global observables in the large-$N_c$ limit. Using this setup, we compute gap fractions for dijet processes and isolation cone cross sections relevant for photon production. We compare our results with fixed-order computations and LHC measurements. We find that naive exponentiation is often not adequate, especially when the vetoed region is small, since non-global contributions are enhanced due to their dependence on the veto-region size. Since our parton shower is derived from first principles and based on renormalization-group evolution, it is clear what ingredients will have to be included to perform resummations at subleading logarithmic accuracy in the future.

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arXiv2017

Non-global and rapidity logarithms in narrow jet broadening

We derive an all-order factorization theorem for the narrow jet broadening event shape, a measure of the transverse momentum in jet events. This is a non-global observable which receives logarithmically enhanced contributions associated with the large rapidity difference between soft and collinear radiation and which is also sensitive to soft recoil effects. Our work is the first factorization analysis of an observable of this type and we show that with regard to the non-global nature, the rapidity logarithms do not constitute an essential complication since they can be tied to the jet function, which is the same as for global observables. As a consequence, the leading non-global logarithms in narrow jet broadening are encoded in the same overall factor relevant for the hemisphere soft function and light jet mass.

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arXiv2017

Factorization and Resummation for Jet Processes

From a detailed analysis of cone-jet cross sections in effective field theory, we obtain novel factorization theorems which separate the physics associated with different energy scales present in such processes. The relevant low-energy physics is encoded in Wilson lines along the directions of the energetic particles inside the jets. This multi-Wilson-line structure is present even for narrow-cone jets due to the relevance of small-angle soft radiation. We discuss the renormalization-group equations satisfied by these operators. Their solution resums all logarithmically enhanced contributions to such processes, including non-global logarithms. Such logarithms arise in many observables, in particular whenever hard phase-space constraints are imposed, and are not captured with standard resummation techniques. Our formalism provides the basis for higher-order logarithmic resummations of jet and other non-global observables. As a nontrivial consistency check, we use it to obtain explicit two-loop results for all logarithmically enhanced terms in cone-jet cross sections and verify those against numerical fixed-order computations.

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arXiv2016

Factorization for the light-jet mass and hemisphere soft function

Many collider observables suffer from non-global logarithms not captured by standard resummation techniques. Classic examples are the light-jet mass event shape in the limit of small mass and the related hemisphere soft function. We derive factorization formulas for both of these and explicitly demonstrate that they capture all logarithms present at NNLO. These formulas achieve full scale separation and provide the basis for all-order resummations. A characteristic feature of non-global observables is that the soft radiation is driven by multi-Wilson-line operators, and the ones arising here map onto those relevant for the case of narrow-cone jet cross sections. Numerically, the contributions of non-global logarithms to resummed hemisphere-mass event shapes are sizeable.

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arXiv2016

QCD and High Energy Interactions: Moriond 2016 Theory Summary

I summarize the theory talks presented at the 50 year anniversary conference. The talks covered a wide range of topics, but common threads included next-to-next-to-leading order predictions for many 2 -> 2 processes, beyond QCD lattice simulations, work on the set of persistent flavor physics anomalies, and discussions of the significance and possible explanations of the diphoton excess at 750 GeV.

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arXiv2016

An Effective Field Theory for Jet Processes

Processes involving narrow jets receive perturbative corrections enhanced by logarithms of the jet opening angle and the ratio of the energies inside and outside the jets. Analyzing cone-jet processes in effective field theory, we find that in addition to soft and collinear fields their description requires degrees of freedom which are simultaneously soft and collinear to the jets. These collinear-soft particles can resolve individual collinear partons, leading to a complicated multi-Wilson-line structure of the associated operators at higher orders. Our effective field theory provides, for the first time, a factorization formula for a cone-jet process, which fully separates the physics at different energy scales. Its renormalization-group equations control all logarithmically enhanced higher-order terms, in particular also the non-global logarithms.

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arXiv2016

Next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic resummation for transverse thrust

We obtain a prediction for the hadron-collider event-shape variable transverse thrust in which the terms enhanced in the dijet limit are resummed to next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy. Our method exploits universality properties made manifest in the factorized expression for the cross section and only requires one-loop calculations. The necessary two-loop ingredients are extracted using known results and existing numerical codes. Our technique is general and applicable to other observables as well.

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arXiv2015

Addendum: Electroweak Sudakov effects in W, Z and gamma production at large transverse momentum

In this addendum to Phys. Rev. D 88, no. 1, 013009 (2013), we give results for the electroweak Sudakov corrections in gauge-boson production at large transverse momentum p_T at proton colliders. In order for the results to be easily usable, we provide a simple and accurate parameterization of the corrections as a function of p_T and the center-of-mass energy \sqrt{s}. Additionally, we also discuss the dependence of the electroweak corrections on the rapidity of the produced boson, and comment on the complications that arise in the photon-production case due to isolation requirements

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arXiv2015

Factorization and resummation for transverse thrust

We analyze transverse thrust in the framework of Soft Collinear Effective Theory and obtain a factorized expression for the cross section that permits resummation of terms enhanced in the dijet limit to arbitrary accuracy. The factorization theorem for this hadron-collider event-shape variable involves collinear emissions at different virtualities and suffers from a collinear anomaly. We compute all its ingredients at the one-loop order, and show that the two-loop input for next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy can be extracted numerically, from existing fixed-order codes.

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arXiv2015

Automated NNLL+NLO Resummation for Jet-Veto Cross Sections

In electroweak-boson production processes with a jet veto, higher-order corrections are enhanced by logarithms of the veto scale over the invariant mass of the boson system. In this paper, we resum these Sudakov logarithms at next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic (NNLL) accuracy and match our predictions to next-to-leading order (NLO) fixed-order results. We perform the calculation in an automated way, for arbitrary electroweak final states and in the presence of kinematic cuts on the leptons produced in the decays of the electroweak bosons. The resummation is based on a factorization theorem for the cross sections into hard functions, which encode the virtual corrections to the boson production process, and beam functions, which describe the low-p_T emissions collinear to the beams. The one-loop hard functions for arbitrary processes are calculated using the MadGraph5_aMC@NLO framework, while the beam functions are process independent. We perform the resummation for a variety of processes, in particular for W+W- pair production followed by leptonic decays of the W bosons.

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arXiv2014

Transverse-momentum spectra of electroweak bosons near threshold at NNLO

We obtain the next-to-next-to-leading order corrections to transverse-momentum spectra of W, Z and Higgs bosons near the partonic threshold. In the threshold limit, the electroweak boson recoils against a low-mass jet and all radiation is either soft, or collinear to the jet or the beam directions. We extract the virtual corrections from known results for the relevant two-loop four-point amplitudes and combine them with the soft and collinear two-loop functions as defined in Soft-Collinear Effective Theory. We have implemented these results in a public code PeTeR and present numerical results for the threshold resummed cross section of W and Z bosons at next-to-next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy, matched to next-to-leading fixed-order perturbation theory. The two-loop corrections lead to a moderate increase in the cross section and reduce the scale uncertainty by about a factor of two. The corrections are significantly larger for Higgs production.

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arXiv2014

The transverse-momentum spectrum of Higgs bosons near threshold at NNLO

We give next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) predictions for the Higgs production cross section at large transverse momentum in the threshold limit. Near the partonic threshold, all radiation is either soft or collinear to the final state jet which recoils against the Higgs boson. We find that the real emission corrections are of moderate size, but that the virtual corrections are large. We discuss the origin of these corrections and give numerical predictions for the transverse-momentum spectrum. The threshold result is matched to the known NLO result and implemented in the public code PeTeR.

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arXiv2014

Renormalization-Group Improved Prediction for Higgs Production at Hadron Colliders

We use renormalization-group methods in effective field theory to improve the theoretical prediction for the cross section for Higgs-boson production at hadron colliders. In addition to soft-gluon resummation at NNNLL, we also resum enhanced contributions of the form (C_Aπα_s)^n, which arise in the analytic continuation of the gluon form factor to time-like momentum transfer. This resummation is achieved by evaluating the matching corrections arising at the Higgs-boson mass scale at a time-like renormalization point μ^2<0, followed by renormalization-group evolution to μ^2>0. We match our resummed result to NNLO fixed-order perturbation theory and give numerical predictions for the total production cross section as a function of the Higgs-boson mass. Resummation effects are significant even at NNLO, where our improved predictions for the cross sections at the Tevatron and the LHC exceed the fixed-order predictions by about 13% and 8%, respectively, for m_H=120 GeV. We also discuss the application of our technique to other time-like processes such as Drell-Yan production, e^+ e^- --> hadrons, and hadronic decays of the Higgs boson.

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arXiv2014

Enhanced non-perturbative effects through the collinear anomaly

We show that non-perturbative effects are logarithmically enhanced for transverse-momentum-dependent observables such as q_T-spectra of electroweak bosons in hadronic collisions and jet broadening at e^+e^- colliders. This enhancement arises from the collinear anomaly, a mechanism characteristic for transverse observables, which induces logarithmic dependence on the hard scale in the product of the soft and collinear matrix elements. Our analysis is based on an operator product expansion and provides, for the first time, a systematic, model-independent way to study non-perturbative effects for this class of observables. For the case of jet broadening, we relate the leading correction to the non-perturbative shift of the thrust distribution.

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arXiv2013

Higgs-Boson Production at Small Transverse Momentum

Using methods from effective field theory, we have recently developed a novel, systematic framework for the calculation of the cross sections for electroweak gauge-boson production at small and very small transverse momentum q_T, in which large logarithms of the scale ratio m_V/q_T are resummed to all orders. This formalism is applied to the production of Higgs bosons in gluon fusion at the LHC. The production cross section receives logarithmically enhanced corrections from two sources: the running of the hard matching coefficient and the collinear factorization anomaly. The anomaly leads to the dynamical generation of a non-perturbative scale q_* ~ m_H e^{-const/α_s(m_H)} ~ 8 GeV, which protects the process from receiving large long-distance hadronic contributions. We present detailed numerical predictions for the transverse-momentum spectrum of the Higgs boson, finding that it is quite insensitive to hadronic effects.

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arXiv2013

On the Structure of Infrared Singularities of Gauge-Theory Amplitudes

A closed formula is obtained for the infrared singularities of dimensionally regularized, massless gauge-theory scattering amplitudes with an arbitrary number of legs and loops. It follows from an all-order conjecture for the anomalous-dimension matrix of n-jet operators in soft-collinear effective theory. We show that the form of this anomalous dimension is severely constrained by soft-collinear factorization, non-abelian exponentiation, and the behavior of amplitudes in collinear limits. Using a diagrammatic analysis, we demonstrate that these constraints imply that to three-loop order the anomalous dimension involves only two-parton correlations, with the possible exception of a single color structure multiplying a function of conformal cross ratios depending on the momenta of four external partons, which would have to vanish in all two-particle collinear limits. We argue that such a function does not appear at three-loop order, and that the same is true in higher orders. Our formula predicts Casimir scaling of the cusp anomalous dimension to all orders in perturbation theory, and we explicitly check that the constraints exclude the appearance of higher Casimir invariants at four loops. Using known results for the quark and gluon form factors, we derive the three-loop coefficients of the 1/epsilon^n pole terms (with n=1,...,6) for an arbitrary n-parton scattering amplitude in massless QCD. This generalizes Catani's two-loop formula proposed in 1998.

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arXiv2013

Infrared singularities of scattering amplitudes in perturbative QCD

An exact formula is derived for the infrared singularities of dimensionally regularized scattering amplitudes in massless QCD with an arbitrary number of legs, valid at any number of loops. It is based on the conjecture that the anomalous-dimension matrix of n-jet operators in soft-collinear effective theory contains only a single non-trivial color structure, whose coefficient is the cusp anomalous dimension of Wilson loops with light-like segments. Its color-diagonal part is characterized by two anomalous dimensions, which are extracted to three-loop order from known perturbative results for the quark and gluon form factors. This allows us to predict the three-loop coefficients of all 1/epsilon^k poles for an arbitrary n-parton scattering amplitudes, generalizing existing two-loop results.

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