Resummation of hadroproduction cross-sections at high energy

AbstractWe reconsider the high energy resummation of photoproduction, electroproduction and hadroproduction cross-sections, in the light of recent progress in the resummation of perturbative parton evolution to NLO in logarithms of Q2 and x. We show in particular that the when the coupling runs the dramatic enhancements seen at fixed coupling, due to infrared singularities in the partonic cross-sections, are substantially reduced, to the extent that they are largely accounted for by the usual NLO and NNLO perturbative corrections. This leads to a novel explanation of the large K-factors commonly found in perturbative calculations of hadroproduction cross-sections. We give numerical estimates of high energy resummation effects for inclusive B-production, inclusive jets, Drell–Yan and vector boson production, along with their rapidity distributions. We find that resummation modifies the B-production cross-section at the LHC by at most 15%, but that the enhancement of gluonic W-production may be as large as 50% at large rapidities