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

Electroweak radiative corrections at high energies

This PhD thesis is concerned with one-loop virtual electroweak corrections to arbitrary processes in the high-energy limit. Complete results are presented for the leading and subleading logarithms of large ratios of energy scales to mass scales. These results include the logarithmic dependence on the photon and weak-boson masses, on the light-fermion masses, as well as on the Higgs- and top-masses in the heavy-Higgs and heavy-top limit. All sources of electroweak logarithmic corrections are taken into account, including the exchange of soft and/or collinear electroweak gauge bosons as well as the renormalization-group running of the gauge, scalar and Yukawa couplings. The logarithmic corrections are derived in a process-independent way, resulting in simple analytic formulas that apply to arbitrary electroweak processes that are not mass-suppressed in the high-energy limit. We also present analytical and numerical applications for the processes: e^+e^- \to f\bar{f}, e^+ e^- \to W^+W^-, ZZ, Z\gamma, \gamma\gamma and \bar{d}u \to W^+Z, W^+\gamma.Comment: PhD thesis, 131 page

NLO QCD corrections to top anti-top bottom anti-bottom production at the LHC: 1. quark-antiquark annihilation

The process pp -> top anti-top bottom anti-bottom + X represents a very important background reaction to searches at the LHC, in particular to top anti-top H production where the Higgs boson decays into a bottom anti-bottom pair. A successful analysis of top anti-top H at the LHC requires the knowledge of direct top anti-top bottom anti-bottom production at next-to-leading order in QCD. We take the first step in this direction upon calculating the next-to-leading-order QCD corrections to the subprocess initiated by quark anti-quark annihilation. We devote an appendix to the general issue of rational terms resulting from ultraviolet or infrared (soft or collinear) singularities within dimensional regularization. There we show that, for arbitrary processes, in the Feynman gauge, rational terms of infrared origin cancel in truncated one-loop diagrams and result only from trivial self-energy corrections.Comment: 30 pages, LaTeX, 12 postscript figure

Electroweak radiative corrections to polarized Moeller scattering at high energies

The cross section for $e^-e^- \to e^-e^-$ with arbitrary electron polarizations is calculated within the Electroweak Standard Model for energies large compared to the electron mass, including the complete virtual and soft-photonic $O(\alpha)$ radiative corrections. The relevant analytical results are listed, and a numerical evaluation is presented for the unpolarized and polarized cross sections as well as for polarization asymmetries. The relative weak corrections are typically of the order of 10%. At low energies, the bulk of the corrections is due to the running of the electromagnetic coupling constant. For left-handed electrons, at high energies the vertex and box corrections involving virtual W bosons become very important. The polarization asymmetry is considerably reduced by the weak radiative corrections.Comment: 18 pages, LaTeX, 15 eps figure