Soft-gluon resummation for high-pT inclusive-hadron production at COMPASS

Abstract

We study the cross section for the photoproduction reaction N ! hX in fixed-target scattering at COMPASS, where the hadron h is produced at large transverse momentum. We investigate the role played by higher-order QCD corrections to the cross section. In particular we address large logarithmic ‘‘threshold’’ corrections to the rapidity-dependent partonic cross sections, which we resum to all orders at next-to-leading accuracy. In our comparison to the experimental data we find that the threshold contributions are large and improve the agreement between data and theoretical predictions significantly.