Threshold resummation effects in direct top quark production at hadron colliders

Abstract

We investigate the threshold-enhanced QCD corrections to the cross sections for direct top quark productions induced by model-independent flavor changing neutral current couplings at hadron colliders. We use the soft-collinear effective theory to describe the incoming massless partons and use the heavy quark effective theory to treat the top quark. Then we construct the flavor changing operator based on the above effective theories, and resum the large logarithms near threshold arising from soft gluon emission. Our results show that the resummed QCD corrections further enhance the next-to-leading order cross sections significantly. Moreover, the resummation effects vastly reduce the dependence of the cross sections on the renormalization and factorization scales, especially in cases where the next-to-leading order results behave worse than the leading order results. Our results are more sensitive to the new physics effects. If signals of direct top quark production are found in future experiments, it is more appropriate to use our results as the theoretical inputs for extracting the anomalous couplings.