Soft-gluon and Coulomb corrections to hadronic top-quark pair production beyond NNLO

We construct a resummation at partial next-to-next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy for hadronic top-quark pair production near partonic threshold, including simultaneously soft-gluon and Coulomb corrections, and use this result to obtain approximate next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order predictions for the total top-quark pair-production cross section at the LHC. We generalize a required one-loop potential in non-relativistic QCD to the colour-octet case and estimate the remaining unknown two-loop potentials and three-loop anomalous dimensions. We obtain a moderate correction of $1.5\%$ relative to the next-to-next-to-leading order prediction and observe a reduction of the perturbative uncertainty below $\pm 5\%$.Comment: 47 pages, 5 figures, v2: published version, typos corrected (including scale uncertainties in Eqs. (4.16)-(4.20)), references added; v3: see added note on p.30 for changes; the results of this work are implemented in the program TOPIXS, which can be found at http://users.ph.tum.de/t31software/topixs

Helicity fractions of W bosons from top quark decays at NNLO in QCD

Decay rates of unpolarized top quarks into longitudinally and transversally polarized W bosons are calculated to second order in the strong coupling constant alpha_s. Including the finite bottom quark mass and electroweak effects, the Standard Model predictions for the W boson helicity fractions are F_L=0.687(5), F_+=0.0017(1), and F_-=0.311(5).Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur

Next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic resummation for transverse thrust

We obtain a prediction for the hadron-collider event-shape variable transverse thrust in which the terms enhanced in the dijet limit are resummed to next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy. Our method exploits universality properties made manifest in the factorized expression for the cross section and only requires one-loop calculations. The necessary two-loop ingredients are extracted using known results and existing numerical codes. Our technique is general and applicable to other observables as well.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures. v2: Corrected values in Eq.(15); updated Figure 2 accordingl

Higgs effects in top anti-top production near threshold in e+ e- annihilation

The completion of the third-order QCD corrections to the inclusive top-pair production cross section near threshold demonstrates that the strong dynamics is under control at the few percent level. In this paper we consider the effects of the Higgs boson on the cross section and, for the first time, combine the third-order QCD result with the third-order P-wave, the leading QED and the leading non-resonant contributions. We study the size of the different effects and investigate the sensitivity of the cross section to variations of the top-quark Yukawa coupling due to possible new physics effects.Comment: LaTeX, 17 page

NNLL soft and Coulomb resummation for squark and gluino production at the LHC

We present predictions for the total cross sections for pair production of squarks and gluinos at the LHC including a combined NNLL resummation of soft and Coulomb gluon effects. We derive all terms in the NNLO cross section that are enhanced near the production threshold, which include contributions from spin-dependent potentials and so-called annihilation corrections. The NNLL corrections at $\sqrt{s}=13$ TeV range from up to $20\%$ for squark-squark production to $90\%$ for gluino pair production relative to the NLO results and reduce the theoretical uncertainties of the perturbative calculation to the $10\%$ level. Grid files with our numerical results are publicly available.Comment: 42 pages, 17 figures. v2: published version; corrected fig. 6; generalized eq.(A.5) to arbitrary SU(N) gauge group