Resummation of next-to-leading logarithms in top quark production
Nikolaos Kidonakis
TL;DR
The paper develops a momentum-space, color-space resummation framework for heavy-quark production near threshold, factorizing the cross section into collinear distributions and a soft color-space matrix whose evolution is governed by a soft anomalous-dimension operator, enabling resummation of threshold logarithms to next-to-leading-log accuracy. Applied to top-quark production at the Fermilab Tevatron, the approach predicts a sizable enhancement from NLL terms (e.g., 5.3 pb for m = 175 GeV with Q = m, vs. 3.7 pb without NLL). These results illustrate the importance of NLL resummation for precise cross sections and provide groundwork for extending the method to other heavy flavor and jet production processes.
Abstract
We discuss the resummation of next-to-leading logarithms (NLL) in heavy quark production near threshold. Results are presented for top quark production at the Fermilab Tevatron.