RG-improved single-particle inclusive cross sections and forward-backward asymmetry in tt¯tt¯ production at hadron colliders.

Ahrens, Valentin; Ferroglia, Andrea; Neubert, Matthias; Pecjak, Ben D.; Yang, Li-Lin

Abstract

We use techniques from soft-collinear effective theory (SCET) to derive renormalization-group improved predictions for single-particle inclusive (1PI) observables in top-quark pair production at hadron colliders. In particular, we study the top-quark transverse-momentum and rapidity distributions, the forward-backward asymmetry at the Tevatron, and the total cross section at NLO + NNLL order in resummed perturbation theory and at approximate NNLO in fixed order. We also perform a detailed analysis of power corrections to the leading terms in the threshold expansion of the partonic hard-scattering kernels. We conclude that, although the threshold expansion in 1PI kinematics is susceptible to numerically significant power corrections, its predictions for the total cross section are in good agreement with those obtained by integrating the top-pair invariant-mass distribution in pair invariant-mass kinematics, as long as a certain set of subleading terms appearing naturally within the SCET formalism is included.

Citation

Ahrens, V., Ferroglia, A., Neubert, M., Pecjak, B. D., & Yang, L. (2011). RG-improved single-particle inclusive cross sections and forward-backward asymmetry in tt¯tt¯ production at hadron colliders. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2011(9), Article 070. https://doi.org/10.1007/jhep09%282011%29070

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: 2011-09
• Deposit Date: Nov 20, 2012
• Journal: Journal of High Energy Physics
• Print ISSN: 1126-6708
• Electronic ISSN: 1029-8479
• Publisher: Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 2011
• Issue: 9
• Article Number: 070
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/jhep09%282011%29070
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1500706