Eric Laenen

Cross sections in perturbative QCD are plagued by large corrections from soft and collinear radiation. The most singular terms are known to be universal, which allows their resummation to all orders in the coupling. We have examined the structure of the next-to-singular contributions, which can originate from the emission of both soft quarks and gluons. We show that we can derive a next-to-soft amplitude for both types of emissions. The numerical impact of these contributions on the transverse momentum distribution of the single-photon production process are also discussed.

We present state-of-the art predictions for the production of supersymmetric squarks and gluinos at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), including soft-gluon resummation up to next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic (NNLL) accuracy, the resummation of Coulomb corrections and the contribution from bound states. The NNLL corrections enhance the cross-section predictions and reduce the scale uncertainty to a level of 5-10%. The NNLL resummed cross-section predictions can be obtained from the computer code NNLL-fast, which also provides the scale uncertainty and the pdf and alpha_s error.

The production of supersymmetric stop-antistop pairs at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is studied including corrections from soft-gluon resummation up to next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic (NNLL) accuracy in the Mellin-space approach. Additionally, corrections to the hard-matching coefficient at one-loop and Coulomb contributions at two-loop order are considered. The NNLL corrections enhance the cross section for all stop masses at centre-of-mass energies of 8 and 13 TeV compared to the previously calculated predictions at next-to-leading logarithmic (NLL) accuracy. Furthermore, a slight increase in the dependence on the additional stop-mixing parameters is observed.

There is ample evidence, dating as far back as Low's theorem, that the universality of soft emissions extends beyond leading power in the soft energy. This universality can, in principle, be exploited to generalise the formalism of threshold resummations beyond leading power in the threshold variable. In the past years, several phenomenological approaches have been partially successful in performing such a resummation. Here, we briefly review some recent developments which pave the way to a solution of this problem, at least for electroweak annihilation processes.

We perform the resummation of soft-gluon emissions for squark and gluino production at next- to-next-to-leading-logarithmic (NNLL) accuracy. We include also the one-loop hard matching coefficients as well as Coulomb corrections to second order, using Mellin-moment methods. We study the characteristics of this resummation in detail for a centre-of-mass (CM) energy of 8 TeV at the LHC, and for squark and gluino masses up to 2.5 TeV. We find significant enhancing effects for all four processes of squark- and gluino-pair production. Scale dependence is generally reduced compared to NLL resummation, except for gluino-pair production where we find a moderate enhancement.

We present the hard matching coefficients for squark and gluino hadroproduction. The hard matching coefficients follow from the next-to-leading order cross section near threshold and are an important ingredient for performing threshold resummation at next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy. We discuss the calculation, list the analytical results and study the numerical impact of these corrections. We find that the impact of the hard matching coefficients can be considerable, with the largest effect observed for final states involving gluinos.