A next-to-next-to-leading order calculation of soft-virtual cross sections

Abstract

We compute the next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) soft and virtual QCD corrections for the partonic cross section of colourless-final state processes in hadronic collisions. The results are valid to all orders in the dimensional regularization parameter Ïμ. The dependence of the results on a particular process is given through finite contributions to the one and two-loop amplitudes, which have to be computed in a process-by-process basis. To evaluate the accuracy of the soft-virtual approximation we compare it with the full NNLO result for Drell-Yan and Higgs boson production via gluon fusion. We also provide a universal expression for the hard coefficient needed to perform threshold resummation up to next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic (NNLL) accuracy. © 2012 SISSA, Trieste, Italy.