Transverse momentum resummation in soft-collinear effective theory

We present a universal formalism for transverse momentum resummation in the view of soft-collinear effective theory (SCET), and establish the relation between our SCET formula and the well known Collins-Soper-Sterman's pQCD formula at the next-to-leading logarithmic order (NLLO). We also briefly discuss the reformulation of joint resummation in SCET.Comment: 23 pages, 7 figures; version to appear in Phys. Rev.

Search for anomalous top quark production at the early LHC

We present a detailed study of the anomalous top quark production with subsequent decay at the LHC induced by model-independent flavor-changing neutral-current couplings, incorporating the complete next-to-leading order QCD effects. Our results show that, taking into account the current limits from the Tevatron, the LHC with $\sqrt{s}=7$ TeV may discover the anomalous coupling at 5$\sigma$ level for a very low integrated luminosity of 61 pb$^{-1}$. The discovery potentials for the anomalous couplings at the LHC are examined in detail. We also discuss the possibility of using the charge ratio to distinguish the $tug$ and $tcg$ couplings.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, version appears in Phys. Rev. Let

Threshold Resummation Effects in Direct Top Quark Production at Hadron Colliders

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.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, use revtex4 and amsmath; version to appear in Phys. Rev.