Factorization structure of gauge theory amplitudes and application to hard scattering processes at the LHC

Abstract

Previous work on electroweak radiative corrections to high energy scattering using soft-collinear effective theory (SCET) has been extended to include external transverse and longitudinal gauge bosons and Higgs bosons. This allows one to compute radiative corrections to all parton-level hard scattering amplitudes in the standard model to NLL order, including QCD and electroweak radiative corrections, mass effects, and Higgs exchange corrections, if the high-scale matching, which is suppressed by two orders in the log counting, and contains no large logs, is known. The factorization structure of the effective theory places strong constraints on the form of gauge theory amplitudes at high energy for massless and massive gauge theories, which are discussed in detail in the paper. The radiative corrections can be written as the sum of process-independent one-particle collinear functions, and a universal soft function. We give plots for the radiative corrections to q qbar -> W_T W_T, Z_T Z_T, W_L W_L, and Z_L H, and gg -> W_T W_T to illustrate our results. The purely electroweak corrections are large, ranging from 12% at 500 GeV to 37% at 2 TeV for transverse W pair production, and increasing rapidly with energy. The estimated theoretical uncertainty to the partonic (hard) cross-section in most cases is below one percent, smaller than uncertainties in the parton distribution functions (PDFs). We discuss the relation between SCET and other factorization methods, and derive the Magnea-Sterman equations for the Sudakov form factor using SCET, for massless and massive gauge theories, and for light and heavy external particles.