Absence of linear power corrections in heavy-quark pair production in a non-Abelian gauge theory
Abstract
We study the infrared sensitivity of heavy-quark pair production by a color-neutral vector current in perturbation theory. We work in a spontaneously broken SU(2) gauge theory where, by tuning parameters to make the gauge-boson mass mg small, we use it as a probe of infrared physics. We find that, through next-to-next-to-leading order, terms linear in mg cancel in the differential cross section, provided that it is expressed through a short-distance heavy-quark mass. Interestingly, we establish this cancellation without evaluating any integrals explicitly, by relating virtual integrals to real-emission ones through loop-energy residues, with a suitable redefinition of the real-emission momenta. Our result is the first strong indication that the cancellation of non-perturbative linear power corrections in the corresponding QCD process extends to the non-Abelian sector. It is also a concrete non-Abelian example of the extension of the Kinoshita-Lee-Nauenberg theorem to linear infrared terms for sufficiently inclusive observables.
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BibTeX
@misc{fontes2026absence,
title = {{Absence of linear power corrections in heavy-quark pair production in a non-Abelian gauge theory}},
author = {Duarte Fontes and Dennis Horstmann and Kirill Melnikov and Davide Maria Tagliabue},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.36065},
eprint = {2610.36065},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36065},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Absence of linear power corrections in heavy-quark pair production in a non-Abelian gauge theory
AU - Duarte Fontes
AU - Dennis Horstmann
AU - Kirill Melnikov
AU - Davide Maria Tagliabue
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/26
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.36065
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36065
AB - We study the infrared sensitivity of heavy-quark pair production by a color-neutral vector current in perturbation theory. We work in a spontaneously broken SU(2) gauge theory where, by tuning parameters to make the gauge-boson mass m_g small, we use it as a probe of infrared physics. We find that, through next-to-next-to-leading order, terms linear in m_g cancel in the differential cross section, provided that it is expressed through a short-distance heavy-quark mass. Interestingly, we establish this cancellation without evaluating any integrals explicitly, by relating virtual integrals to real-emission ones through loop-energy residues, with a suitable redefinition of the real-emission momenta. Our result is the first strong indication that the cancellation of non-perturbative linear power corrections in the corresponding QCD process extends to the non-Abelian sector. It is also a concrete non-Abelian example of the extension of the Kinoshita-Lee-Nauenberg theorem to linear infrared terms for sufficiently inclusive observables.
ER -