One-loop leading logarithms in electroweak radiative corrections: II. Factorization of collinear singularities

We discuss the evaluation of the collinear single-logarithmic contributions to virtual electroweak corrections at high energies. More precisely, we proof the factorization of the mass singularities originating from loop diagrams involving collinear virtual gauge bosons coupled to external legs. We discuss, in particular, processes involving external longitudinal gauge bosons, which are treated using the Goldstone-boson equivalence theorem. The proof of factorization is performed within the 't Hooft--Feynman gauge at one-loop order and applies to arbitrary electroweak processes that are not mass-suppressed at high energies. As basic ingredient we use Ward identities for Green functions with arbitrary external particles involving a gauge boson collinear to one of these. The Ward identities are derived from the BRS invariance of the spontaneously broken electroweak gauge theory.Comment: 28 pages, late

One-loop leading logarithms in electroweak radiative corrections, I. Results

We present results for the complete one-loop electroweak logarithmic corrections for general processes at high energies and fixed angles. Our results are applicable to arbitrary matrix elements that are not mass-suppressed. We give explicit results for 4-fermion processes and gauge-boson-pair production in electron-positron annihilation.Comment: 35 pages, latex, 4 postscript figures, some misprints correcte

On-the-fly reduction of open loops

Building on the open-loop algorithm we introduce a new method for the automated construction of one-loop amplitudes and their reduction to scalar integrals. The key idea is that the factorisation of one-loop integrands in a product of loop segments makes it possible to perform various operations on-the-fly while constructing the integrand. Reducing the integrand on-the-fly, after each segment multiplication, the construction of loop diagrams and their reduction are unified in a single numerical recursion. In this way we entirely avoid objects with high tensor rank, thereby reducing the complexity of the calculations in a drastic way. Thanks to the on-the-fly approach, which is applied also to helicity summation and for the merging of different diagrams, the speed of the original open-loop algorithm can be further augmented in a very significant way. Moreover, addressing spurious singularities of the employed reduction identities by means of simple expansions in rank-two Gram determinants, we achieve a remarkably high level of numerical stability. These features of the new algorithm, which will be made publicly available in a forthcoming release of the OpenLoops program, are particularly attractive for NLO multi-leg and NNLO real-virtual calculations.Comment: v2 as accepted by EPJ C: extended discussion of the triangle reduction and its numerical stability in section 5.4.2; speed benchmarks for 2->5 processes included in section 6.2.1; ref. adde

A unified NLO description of top-pair and associated Wt production

We present an NLO simulation of WWbb production with massive b-quarks at the LHC. Off-shell and non-resonant contributions associated with top-pair and single-top channels and with leptonic W-boson decays are consistently taken into account using the complex-mass scheme. Thanks to the finite b-quark mass, WWbb predictions can be extended to the whole b-quark phase space, thereby including Wt-channel single-top contributions that originate from collinear g->bb splittings in the four-flavour scheme. This provides a consistent NLO description of tt and Wt production and decay, including quantum interference effects. The simulation is also applicable to exclusive 0- and 1-jet bins, which is of great importance for Higgs-boson studies in the H->WW channel and for any other analysis with large top backgrounds and jet vetoes or jet bins.Comment: 8pp. Minor revision, results unchange

Precise numerical evaluation of the two loop sunrise graph Master Integrals in the equal mass case

We present a double precision routine in Fortran for the precise and fast numerical evaluation of the two Master Integrals (MIs) of the equal mass two-loop sunrise graph for arbitrary momentum transfer in d=2 and d=4 dimensions. The routine implements the accelerated power series expansions obtained by solving the corresponding differential equations for the MIs at their singular points. With a maximum of 22 terms for the worst case expansion a relative precision of better than a part in 10^{15} is achieved for arbitrary real values of the momentum transfer.Comment: 11 pages, LaTeX. The complete paper is also available via the www at http://www-ttp.physik.uni-karlsruhe.de/Preprints/ and the program can be downloaded from http://www-ttp.physik.uni-karlsruhe.de/Progdata