Soft and Coulomb gluon resummation in squark-antisquark production at the LHC

We present results for a combined resummation of soft and Coloumb gluon corrections in squark-antisquark production at the LHC, including the non-trivial interference of the two effects and the contribution of squark-antisquark bound states below threshold. The total correction to the next-to-leading order approximation is found to be sizeable, and amounts to 5-14 % in the squark mass region 200 GeV-2 TeV. The scale dependence of the total cross section is also reduced.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, to appear in the proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Radiative Corrections (RADCOR 2009), October 25-30 2009, Ascona, Switzerlan

Threshold expansion of massive coloured particle cross sections

Pair production of massive coloured particles in hadron collisions is accompanied by potentially large radiative corrections related to the suppression of soft gluon emission and enhanced Coulomb exchange near the production threshold. We recently developed a framework to sum both series of corrections for the partonic cross section using soft-collinear and non-relativistic effective theory. If it can be argued that the resummed cross section approximates the complete result over a significant kinematic range, an improvement of the hadronic cross section results, even when the production is not kinematically constrained to the threshold. This is discussed here for the case of top quark production.Comment: 5 pages, to appear in: Proceedings of the 10th DESY Workshop on Elementary Particle Theory: Loops and Legs in Quantum Field Theory 2010, W\"orlitz, Germany, 25-30 Apr 201

A comparison of efficient methods for the computation of Born gluon amplitudes

We compare four different methods for the numerical computation of the pure gluonic amplitudes in the Born approximation. We are in particular interested in the efficiency of the various methods as the number n of the external particles increases. In addition we investigate the numerical accuracy in critical phase space regions. The methods considered are based on (i) Berends-Giele recurrence relations, (ii) scalar diagrams, (iii) MHV vertices and (iv) BCF recursion relations.Comment: 20 page

On-shell recursion relations for all Born QCD amplitudes

We consider on-shell recursion relations for all Born QCD amplitudes. This includes amplitudes with several pairs of quarks and massive quarks. We give a detailed description on how to shift the external particles in spinor space and clarify the allowed helicities of the shifted legs. We proof that the corresponding meromorphic functions vanish at z --> infinity. As an application we obtain compact expressions for helicity amplitudes including a pair of massive quarks, one negative helicity gluon and an arbitrary number of positive helicity gluons.Comment: 30 pages, minor change

SUSY Ward identities for multi-gluon helicity amplitudes with massive quarks

We use supersymmetric Ward identities to relate multi-gluon helicity amplitudes involving a pair of massive quarks to amplitudes with massive scalars. This allows to use the recent results for scalar amplitudes with an arbitrary number of gluons obtained by on-shell recursion relations to obtain scattering amplitudes involving top quarks.Comment: 22 pages, references adde

Hadronic top-quark pair production with NNLL threshold resummation

We compute the total top-quark pair production cross section at the Tevatron and LHC based on approximate NNLO results, and on the summation of threshold logarithms and Coulomb enhancements to all orders with next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic (NNLL) accuracy, including bound-state effects. We find \sigma_{t\bar t} = 7.22^{+0.31+0.71}_{-0.47-0.55} pb at Tevatron and \sigma_{t\bar t} = 162.6^{+7.4+15.4}_{-7.6-14.7} pb at LHC with 7 TeV c.o.m. energy, for m_t=173.3 GeV. The implementation of joint soft and Coulomb resummation, its ambiguities, and the present theoretical uncertainty are discussed in detail. We further obtain new approximate results at N3LO.Comment: 55 pages, LaTeX, 13 figure

No triangles on the moduli space of maximally supersymmetric gauge theory

Maximally supersymmetric gauge theory in four dimensions has a remarkably simple S-matrix at the origin of its moduli space at both tree and loop level. This leads to the question what, if any, of this structure survives at the complement of this one point. Here this question is studied in detail at one loop for the branch of the moduli space parameterized by a vacuum expectation value for one complex scalar. Motivated by the parallel D-brane picture of spontaneous symmetry breaking a simple relation is demonstrated between the Lagrangian of broken super Yang-Mills theory and that of its higher dimensional unbroken cousin. Using this relation it is proven both through an on- as well as an off-shell method there are no so-called triangle coefficients in the natural basis of one-loop functions at any finite point of the moduli space for the theory under study. The off-shell method yields in addition absence of rational terms in a class of theories on the Coulomb branch which includes the special case of maximal supersymmetry. The results in this article provide direct field theory evidence for a recently proposed exact dual conformal symmetry motivated by the AdS/CFT correspondence.Comment: 39 pages, 4 figure

Multigluon tree amplitudes with a pair of massive fermions

We consider the calculation of n-point multigluon tree amplitudes with a pair of massive fermions in QCD. We give the explicit transformation rules of this kind of massive fermion-pair amplitudes with respect to different reference momenta and check the correctness of them by SUSY Ward identities. Using these rules and onshell BCFW recursion relation, we calculate the analytic results of several n-point multigluon amplitudes.Comment: 15page