A consistent resummation of mass and soft logarithms in processes with heavy flavours

Abstract

Perturbative calculations for processes that involve heavy flavours can be performed in two approaches: the massive scheme and the massless one. The former enables one to fully account for the heavy-quark kinematics, while the latter allows one to resum potentially-large mass logarithms. Furthermore, the two schemes can be combined to take advantage of the virtues of each of them. Both massive and massless calculations can be supplemented by soft-gluon resummation. However matching between massive and massless resummed calculations is difficult, essentially because of the non-commutativity of the soft and massless limits. In this paper, we develop a formalism to combine resummed massive and massless calculations. We obtain an all-order expression that consistently resums both mass and soft logarithms to next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy. We perform detailed calculations for the decay of the Higgs into a heavy-quark pair, and discuss the applications of this formalism to different processes.