Subleading effects in soft-gluon emission at one-loop in massless QCD

Abstract

We elucidate the structure of the next-to-leading-power soft-gluon expansion of arbitrary one-loop massless-QCD amplitudes. The expansion is given in terms of universal colour-, spin- and flavour-dependent operators acting on process-dependent gauge-invariant amplitudes. The result is proven using the method of expansion-by-regions and tested numerically on non-trivial processes with up to six partons. In principle, collinear-region contributions are expressed in terms of convolutions of universal jet operators and process-dependent amplitudes with two collinear partons. However, we evaluate these convolutions exactly for arbitrary processes. This is achieved by deriving an expression for the next-to-leading power expansion of tree-level amplitudes in the collinear limit, which is a novel result as well. Compared to previous studies, our analysis, besides being more general, yields simpler formulae that avoid derivatives of process-dependent amplitudes in the collinear limit.