Search

We provide a detailed account of the methods and calculations for the third-order corrections to the S-wave Green function from heavy-quark potentials other than the Coulomb potential. The results of this paper are relevant to the top-antitop threshold production process in next-to-next-to-next-to-leading (NNNLO) order and to the determination of the bottom-quark mass from high-moment sum rules, and have been employed in corresponding previous publications. Further to the third-order calculation, we discuss in detail three refinements necessary to obtain reliable third-order results for the top threshold: finite-width effects, pole resummation, and the implementation of the potential-subtracted mass scheme. A detailed numerical analysis of residual scale dependence and the size of various contributions to the top production cross section is provided. The S-wave energy levels and wave functions at the origin for heavy quarkonium states of arbitrary principal quantum number $n$ are collected in an appendix., Comment: 108 pages, 23 figures, part I arXiv:1312.4791

The lack of convergence of the convolution integrals appearing in next-to-leading-power (NLP) factorization theorems prevents the applications of existing methods to resum power-suppressed large logarithmic corrections in collider physics. We consider thrust distribution in the two-jet region for the flavour-nonsinglet off-diagonal contribution, where a gluon-initiated jet recoils against a quark-antiquark pair, which is power-suppressed. With the help of operatorial endpoint factorization conditions, we obtain a factorization formula, where the individual terms are free from endpoint divergences in convolutions and can be expressed in terms of renormalized hard, soft and collinear functions in four dimensions. This allows us to perform the first resummation of the endpoint-divergent SCET$_{\rm I}$ observables at the leading logarithmic accuracy using exclusively renormalization-group methods. The presented approach relies on universal properties of the soft and collinear limits and may serve as a paradigm for the systematic NLP resummation for other $1\to 2$ and $2\to 1$ collider physics processes., Comment: 53 pages, 8 figures

We present a novel double-copy prescription for gauge fields at the Lagrangian level and apply it to the original double copy, couplings to matter and the soft theorem. The Yang-Mills Lagrangian in light-cone gauge is mapped directly to the $\mathcal{N}=0$ supergravity Lagrangian in light-cone gauge to trilinear order, and we show that the obtained result is manifestly equivalent to Einstein gravity at tree level up to this order. The application of the double-copy prescription to couplings to matter is exemplified by scalar and fermionic QCD and finally the soft-collinear effective QCD Lagrangian. The mapping of the latter yields an effective description of an energetic Dirac fermion coupled to the graviton, Kalb-Ramond, and dilaton fields, from which the fermionic gravitational soft and next-to-soft theorems follow., Comment: v2: 31 pages, LaTeX, added Sec. 5 discussing scalar and fermion couplings, extended outlook and appendix. Matches published version

Due to the high anticipated experimental precision at the Future Circular Collider FCC-ee (or other proposed $e^+e^-$ colliders, such as ILC, CLIC, or CEPC) for electroweak and Higgs-boson precision measurements, theoretical uncertainties may have, if unattended, an important impact on the interpretation of these measurements within the Standard Model (SM), and thus on constraints on new physics. Current theory uncertainties, which would dominate the total uncertainty, need to be strongly reduced through future advances in the calculation of multi-loop radiative corrections together with improved experimental and theoretical control of the precision of SM input parameters. This document aims to provide an estimate of the required improvement in calculational accuracy in view of the anticipated high precision at the FCC-ee. For the most relevant electroweak and Higgs-boson precision observables we evaluate the corresponding quantitative impact., Comment: 20 pages, references updated

The Future Circular Collider (FCC) at CERN, a proposed 100-km circular facility with several colliders in succession, culminates with a 100 TeV proton-proton collider. It offers a vast new domain of exploration in particle physics, with orders of magnitude advances in terms of Precision, Sensitivity and Energy. The implementation plan foresees, as a first step, an Electroweak Factory electron-positron collider. This high luminosity facility, operating between 90 and 365 GeV centre-of-mass energy, will study the heavy particles of the Standard Model, Z, W, Higgs, and top with unprecedented accuracy. The Electroweak Factory $e^+e^-$ collider constitutes a real challenge to the theory and to precision calculations, triggering the need for the development of new mathematical methods and software tools. A first workshop in 2018 had focused on the first FCC-ee stage, the Tera-Z, and confronted the theoretical status of precision Standard Model calculations on the Z-boson resonance to the experimental demands. The second workshop in January 2019, which is reported here, extended the scope to the next stages, with the production of W-bosons (FCC-ee-W), the Higgs boson (FCC-ee-H) and top quarks (FCC-ee-tt). In particular, the theoretical precision in the determination of the crucial input parameters, alpha_QED, alpha_QCD, M_W, m_t at the level of FCC-ee requirements is thoroughly discussed. The requirements on Standard Model theory calculations were spelled out, so as to meet the demanding accuracy of the FCC-ee experimental potential. The discussion of innovative methods and tools for multi-loop calculations was deepened. Furthermore, phenomenological analyses beyond the Standard Model were discussed, in particular the effective theory approaches. The reports of 2018 and 2019 serve as white papers of the workshop results and subsequent developments., Comment: Published version

The annihilation cross section of weakly interacting TeV scale dark matter particles $\chi^0$ into photons is affected by large quantum corrections due to electroweak Sudakov logarithms and the Sommerfeld effect. We extend our previous work on the resummation of the semi-inclusive photon energy spectrum in $\chi^0\chi^0\to \gamma+X$ in the vicinity of the maximal photon energy $E_\gamma = m_\chi$ with NLL' accuracy from the case of narrow photon energy resolution $E^\gamma_{\rm res}$ of order $m_W^2/m_\chi$ to intermediate resolution of order $E^\gamma_{\rm res} \sim m_W$. We also provide details on the previous narrow resolution calculation. The two calculations, performed in different effective field theory set-ups for the wino dark matter model, are then shown to match well, providing an accurate representation up to energy resolutions of about 300 GeV., Comment: 52 pages + 38 pages appendices, LaTeX, v2: corrections implemented as detailed in Erratum: JHEP 07 (2020) 145 + typos in (3.22) and (B.54) fixed

We present the physics program of the Belle II experiment, located on the intensity frontier SuperKEKB $e^+e^-$ collider. Belle II collected its first collisions in 2018, and is expected to operate for the next decade. It is anticipated to collect 50/ab of collision data over its lifetime. This book is the outcome of a joint effort of Belle II collaborators and theorists through the Belle II theory interface platform (B2TiP), an effort that commenced in 2014. The aim of B2TiP was to elucidate the potential impacts of the Belle II program, which includes a wide scope of physics topics: B physics, charm, tau, quarkonium, electroweak precision measurements and dark sector searches. It is composed of nine working groups (WGs), which are coordinated by teams of theorist and experimentalists conveners: Semileptonic and leptonic B decays, Radiative and Electroweak penguins, phi_1 and phi_2 (time-dependent CP violation) measurements, phi_3 measurements, Charmless hadronic B decay, Charm, Quarkonium(like), tau and low-multiplicity processes, new physics and global fit analyses. This book highlights "golden- and silver-channels", i.e. those that would have the highest potential impact in the field. Theorists scrutinised the role of those measurements and estimated the respective theoretical uncertainties, achievable now as well as prospects for the future. Experimentalists investigated the expected improvements with the large dataset expected from Belle II, taking into account improved performance from the upgraded detector., Comment: 689 pages

The annihilation cross section of TeV scale dark matter particles $\chi^0$ with electroweak charges into photons is affected by large quantum corrections due to Sudakov logarithms and the Sommerfeld effect. We calculate the semi-inclusive photon energy spectrum in $\chi^0\chi^0\to \gamma+X$ in the vicinity of the maximal photon energy $E_\gamma = m_\chi$ with NLL' accuracy in an all-order summation of the electroweak perturbative expansion adopting the pure wino model. This results in the most precise theoretical prediction of the annihilation rate for $\gamma$-ray telescopes with photon energy resolution of parametric order $m_W^2/m_\chi$ for photons with TeV energies., Comment: 16 pages, v2: corrections implemented as detailed in Erratum: Phys.Lett.B 810, 135831 (2020)

We reconsider the QCD predictions for the radiative decay $B\to \gamma \ell \nu_\ell$ with an energetic photon in the final state by taking into account the $1/E_\gamma, 1/m_b$ power-suppressed hard-collinear and soft corrections from higher-twist $B$-meson light-cone distribution amplitudes (LCDAs). The soft contribution is estimated through a dispersion relation and light-cone QCD sum rules. The analysis of theoretical uncertainties and the dependence of the decay form factors on the leading-twist LCDA $\phi_+(\omega)$ shows that the latter dominates. The radiative leptonic decay is therefore well suited to constrain the parameters of $\phi_+(\omega)$, including the first inverse moment, $1/\lambda_B$, from the expected high-statistics data of the BELLE II experiment., Comment: 35 pages, 9 figures

We combine the known asymptotic behaviour of the QCD perturbation series expansion, which relates the pole mass of a heavy quark to the MSbar mass, with the exact series coefficients up to the four-loop order to determine the ultimate uncertainty of the top-quark pole mass due to the renormalon divergence. We perform extensive tests of our procedure by varying the number of colours and flavours, as well as the scale of the strong coupling and the MSbar mass. Including an estimate of the internal bottom and charm quark mass effect, we conclude that this uncertainty is around 110 MeV. We further estimate the additional contribution to the mass relation from the five-loop correction and beyond to be around 300 MeV., Comment: 16 pages, v2: estimate from finite internal bottom and charm quark mass included

We describe the QQbar_threshold library for computing the production cross section of heavy quark-antiquark pairs near threshold at electron-positron colliders. The prediction includes all presently known QCD, electroweak, Higgs, and nonresonant corrections in the combined nonrelativistic and weak-coupling expansion., Comment: 56 pages, 2 figures, v2: download link corrected

A summary is presented of the workshop "top physics at linear colliders" that was held at IFIC Valencia from the 30th of June to the 3rd July 2015. We present an up-to-date status report of studies into the potential for top quark physics of lepton colliders with an energy reach that exceeds the top quark pair production threshold, with a focus on the linear collider projects ILC and CLIC. This summary shows that such projects can offer very competitive determinations of top quark properties (mass, width) and its interactions with other Standard Model particles, in particular electroweak gauge bosons and the Higgs boson. In both areas the prospects exceed the LHC potential significantly - often by an order of magnitude.

The relic density of TeV-scale wino-like neutralino dark matter in the MSSM is subject to potentially large corrections as a result of the Sommerfeld effect. A recently developed framework enables us to calculate the Sommerfeld-enhanced relic density in general MSSM scenarios, properly treating mixed states and multiple co-annihilating channels as well as including off-diagonal contributions. Using this framework, including on-shell one-loop mass splittings and running couplings and taking into account the latest experimental constraints, we perform a thorough study of the regions of parameter space surrounding the well known pure-wino scenario: namely the effect of sfermion masses being non-decoupled and of allowing non-negligible Higgsino or bino components in the lightest neutralino. We further perform an investigation into the effect of thermal corrections and show that these can safely be neglected. The results reveal a number of phenomenologically interesting but so far unexplored regions where the Sommerfeld effect is sizeable. We find, in particular, that the relic density can agree with experiment for dominantly wino neutralino dark matter with masses ranging from 1.7 to beyond 4 TeV. In light of these results the bounds from Indirect Detection on wino-like dark matter should be revisited., Comment: 49 pages, 15 figures

We perform a comprehensive study of charged lepton flavour violation in Randall-Sundrum (RS) models in a fully 5D quantum-field-theoretical framework. We consider the RS model with minimal field content and a "custodially protected" extension as well as three implementations of the IR-brane localized Higgs field, including the non-decoupling effect of the Kaluza-Klein (KK) excitations of a narrow bulk Higgs. Our calculation provides the first complete result for the flavour-violating electromagnetic dipole operator in Randall-Sundrum models. It contains three contributions with different dependence on the magnitude of the anarchic 5D Yukawa matrix, which can all be important in certain parameter regions. We study the typical range for the branching fractions of mu -> e gamma, mu -> 3e, mu N -> e N as well as tau -> mu gamma, tau -> 3 mu and the electron electric dipole moment by a numerical scan in both the minimal and the custodial RS model. The combination of mu -> e gamma and mu N -> e N currently provides the most stringent constraint on the parameter space of the model. A typical lower limit on the KK scale T is around 2 TeV in the minimal model (up to 4 TeV in the bulk Higgs case with large Yukawa couplings), and around 4 TeV in the custodially protected model, which corresponds to a mass of about 10 TeV for the first KK excitations, far beyond the lower limit from the non-observation of direct production at the LHC., Comment: 64 pages, 21 figures, LaTeX, v2: electron EDM analysis added, matches published version

The combination of collinear factorization with effective field theory originally developed for soft interactions of heavy quarks provides the foundations of the theory of exclusive and semi-inclusive B decays. In this article I summarize some of the later conceptual developments of the so-called QCD factorization approach that make use of soft-collinear effective theory. Then I discuss the status and results of the calculation of the hard-scattering functions at the next order, and review very briefly some of the phenomenology, covering aspects of charmless, electroweak penguin and radiative (semi-leptonic) decays., Comment: 27 pages, LaTeX, 10 figures, to appear in Nucl. Phys. (Proc. Suppl.) ,"Advances in Computational Particle Physics", Proceedings of the Final Meeting of the Collaborative Research Centre / Transregio 9 "Computational Particle Physics", Durbach, Germany, September 2014

Unstable particles are notorious in perturbative quantum field theory for producing singular propagators in scattering amplitudes that require regularization by the finite width. In this review I discuss the construction of an effective field theory for unstable particles, based on the hierarchy of scales between the mass, M, and the width,Gamma, of the unstable particle that allows resonant processes to be systematically expanded in powers of the coupling alpha and Gamma/M, thereby providing gauge-invariant approximations at every order. I illustrate the method with the next-to-leading order line-shape of a scalar resonance in an abelian gauge-Yukawa model, and results on NLO and dominant NNLO corrections to (resonant and non-resonant) pair production of W-bosons and top quarks., Comment: 14 pages, LaTeX, 12 figures, to appear in Nucl. Phys. (Proc. Suppl.) ,"Advances in Computational Particle Physics", Proceedings of the Final Meeting of the Collaborative Research Centre / Transregio 9 "Computational Particle Physics", Durbach, Germany, September 2014

We present a detailed discussion of Sommerfeld enhancements in neutralino dark matter relic abundance calculations for several popular benchmark scenarios in the general MSSM. Our analysis is focused on models with heavy wino- and higgsino-like neutralino LSP and models interpolating between these two scenarios. This work is the first phenomenological application of effective field theory methods that we have developed in earlier work and that allow for the consistent study of Sommerfeld enhancements in non-relativistic neutralino and chargino co-annihilation reactions within the general MSSM, away from the pure-wino and pure-higgsino limits., Comment: 38 pages, 14 figures, 3 tables

This paper concludes the presentation of the non-relativistic effective field theory formalism designed to calculate the radiative corrections that enhance the pair-annihilation cross sections of slowly moving neutralinos and charginos within the general minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM). While papers I and II focused on the computation of the tree-level annihilation rates that feed into the short-distance part, here we describe in detail the method to obtain the Sommerfeld factors that contain the enhanced long-distance corrections. This includes the computation of the potential interactions in the MSSM, which are provided in compact analytic form, and a novel solution of the multi-state Schr\"odinger equation that is free from the numerical instabilities generated by large mass splittings between the scattering states. Our results allow for a precise computation of the MSSM neutralino dark matter relic abundance and pair-annihilation rates in the present Universe, when Sommerfeld enhancements are important., Comment: 59 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables

We determine the mass of the bottom quark from high moments of the bottom production cross section in e+ e- annihilation, which are dominated by the threshold region. On the theory side next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order (NNNLO) calculations both for the resonances and the continuum cross section are used for the first time. We find mb,PS(2 GeV) = 4.532 +0.013 -0.039 GeV for the potential-subtracted mass and mb,MSbar(mb,MSbar) = 4.193 +0.022 -0.035 GeV for the MSbar bottom-quark mass., Comment: 37 pages, 5 figures. Minor change in charm-effect uncertainty, update of conversion uncertainty for MSbar mass, added clarifications and references

This work is on the Physics of the B Factories. Part A of this book contains a brief description of the SLAC and KEK B Factories as well as their detectors, BaBar and Belle, and data taking related issues. Part B discusses tools and methods used by the experiments in order to obtain results. The results themselves can be found in Part C. Please note that version 3 on the archive is the auxiliary version of the Physics of the B Factories book. This uses the notation alpha, beta, gamma for the angles of the Unitarity Triangle. The nominal version uses the notation phi_1, phi_2 and phi_3. Please cite this work as Eur. Phys. J. C74 (2014) 3026., Comment: 928 pages, version 3 (arXiv:1406.6311v3) corresponds to the alpha, beta, gamma version of the book, the other versions use the phi1, phi2, phi3 notation

We describe the computation of the one-loop muon anomalous magnetic moment and radiative penguin transitions in the minimal and custodially protected Randall-Sundrum model. A fully five-dimensional (5D) framework is employed to match the 5D theory onto the Standard Model extended by dimension-six operators. The additional contribution to the anomalous magnetic moment from the gauge-boson exchange contributions is Delta a_mu \approx 8.8 (27.2) x 10^(-11) x (1 TeV/T)^2, where the first (second) number refers to the minimal (custodially-protected) model. Here $1/T$ denotes the location of the TeV brane in conformal coordinates, and is related to the mass of the lowest gauge-boson KK excitation by M_KK \approx 2.35 T. We also determine the Higgs-exchange contribution, which depends on the 5D Yukawa structure and the precise interpretation of the localisation of the Higgs field near or at the TeV brane., Comment: 19 pages

This is the first in a series of papers, in which we compute the third-order QCD corrections to top-antitop production near threshold in e+ e- collisions. The present paper provides a detailed outline of the strategy of computation in the framework of non-relativistic effective theory and the threshold expansion, applicable more generally to heavy-quark pair production near threshold. It summarizes matching coefficients and potentials relevant to the next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order and ends with the master formula for the computation of the third-order Green function. The master formula is evaluated in part II of the series., Comment: 71 pages, 13 figures, v2: substantial update of 2013 version to match to part II

The next-to-leading order (NLO) P-wave Coulomb Green function contributes at third-order to top-pair production in e+ e- collisions near threshold. In this paper we compute the NLO P-wave Green function in dimensional regularization, as required for a consistent combination with non-resonant production of the W+ W- b\bar{b} final state, and present a phenomenological analysis of the P-wave contribution. We further briefly discuss squark production near threshold and top-pair production in gamma gamma collisions, where no S-wave contribution is present, and the P-wave thus constitutes the dominant production process., Comment: 26 pages

We consider the perturbative treatment of the minimally coupled, massless, self-interacting scalar field in Euclidean de Sitter space. Generalizing work of Rajaraman, we obtain the dynamical mass m^2 \propto sqrt{lambda} H^2 of the scalar for non-vanishing Lagrangian masses and the first perturbative quantum correction in the massless case. We develop the rules of a systematic perturbative expansion, which treats the zero-mode non-perturbatively, and goes in powers of sqrt{lambda}. The infrared divergences are self-regulated by the zero-mode dynamics. Thus, in Euclidean de Sitter space the interacting, massless scalar field is just as well-defined as the massive field. We then show that the dynamical mass can be recovered from the diagrammatic expansion of the self-energy and a consistent solution of the Schwinger-Dyson equation, but requires the summation of a divergent series of loop diagrams of arbitrarily high order. Finally, we note that the value of the long-wavelength mode two-point function in Euclidean de Sitter space agrees at leading order with the stochastic treatment in Lorentzian de Sitter space, in any number of dimensions., Comment: LaTeX, 15 pages

We compute analytically the tree-level annihilation rates of a collection of non-relativistic neutralino and chargino two-particle states in the general MSSM, including the previously unknown off-diagonal rates. The results are prerequisites to the calculation of the Sommerfeld enhancement in the MSSM, which will be presented in subsequent work. They can also be used to obtain concise analytic expressions for MSSM dark matter pair annihilation in the present Universe for a large number of exclusive two-particle final states., Comment: LATeX, 24 pages (+ 25 pages Appendix), 11 figures; v2 - replaced incorrect version of Fig. 4 and fixed typos listed in the JHEP erratum

We calculate the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon in the minimal Randall-Sundrum model with standard model fields in five-dimensional (5D) warped space and a brane-localized Higgs. We use a fully 5D framework to compute the one-loop matching coefficients of the effective theory at the electroweak scale. The extra contribution to the anomalous magnetic moment from the model-independent gauge-boson exchange contributions \Delta a_\mu is approximately 8.8*10^-11 (1TeV/T)^2, where 1/T denotes the location of the TeV brane in conformal coordinates, and is related to the mass of the lowest gauge boson KK excitation, which is roughly 2.5T. The result constitutes the first complete determination of the gauge-boson contribution to g-2 and is robust against the variation of the bulk fermion masses and 5D Yukawa coupling. We also determine the strongly model-parameter dependent effect of Higgs-exchange diagrams., Comment: 73 pages, 9 figures (V2: extended discussion of Higgs contributions and effects of wrong-chirality Higgs couplings added, typos corrected, references added, matches version published on JHEP)

We present results for the total top-pair production cross section at the Tevatron and the LHC. Our predictions supplement fixed-order results with resummation of soft logarithms and Coulomb singularities to next-to-next-to-leading (NNLL) logarithmic accuracy and include top-antitop bound-state effects. The effects of resummation, the dependence on the PDF set used, the residual sources of theoretical uncertainty and their implication for measurements of the top-quark mass are discussed., Comment: LaTeX, 4 pages, 2 figures. To appear in the proceedings of the 16th International Conference in Quantum ChromoDynamics (QCD12), 2-6 July 2012, Montpellier. v2: reference added

We discuss various aspects of inclusive top-quark pair production based on TOPIXS, a new, flexible program that computes the production cross section at the Tevatron and LHC at next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy in soft and Coulomb resummation, including bound-state effects and the complete next-to-next-to-leading order result in the q-qbar channel, which has recently become available. We present the calculation of the top-pair cross section in pp collisions at 8 TeV centre-of-mass energy, as well as the cross sections for hypothetical heavy quarks in extensions of the standard model. The dependence on the parton distribution input is studied. Further we investigate the impact of LHC top cross section measurements at sqrt(s)=7 TeV on global fits of the gluon distribution using the NNPDF re-weighting method., Comment: 27 pages, 5 figures; v2: corrected typos in Eqs. (2.8) and (6.2) and the text, added footnote on page 4, matches published version

We present predictions for the total top-quark pair production cross section at the Tevatron and the LHC with 7,8 and 14 TeV centre-of-mass energy, including the resummation of threshold logarithms and Coulomb corrections through next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic order, and top-antitop bound-state contributions. The remaining theoretical and PDF uncertainties and prospects for the measurement of the top mass from the total cross section are discussed., Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, moriond.sty included. Contribution to the proceedings of the 47th Rencontres de Moriond on QCD and High Energy Interactions, March 10-17, 2012, La Thuile, Italy. v2: references updated

We present predictions for the total ttbar production cross section sigma_ttbar at the Tevatron and LHC, which include the resummation of soft logarithms and Coulomb singularities through next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic order, and ttbar bound-state contributions. Resummation effects amount to about 8 % of the next-to-leading order result at Tevatron and about 3 % at LHC with 7 TeV centre-of-mass energy. They lead to a significant reduction of the theoretical uncertainty. With m_t=173.3 GeV, we find sigma_ttbar=7.22^{+0.31+0.71}_{-0.47-0.55} pb at Tevatron and sigma_ttbar=162.6^{+7.4+15.4}_{-7.5-14.7} at the LHC, in good agreement with the latest experimental measurements., Comment: LaTeX, 8 pages, 3 Figures; to appear in the proceedings of the "10th International Symposium on Radiative Corrections" (RADCOR2011)

We reconsider the utility of the radiative decay $B \to \gamma \ell \nu$ with an energetic photon in the final state for determining parameters of the $B$-meson light-cone distribution amplitude. Including $1/m_b$ power corrections and radiative corrections at next-to-leading logarithmic order, we perform an improved analysis of the existing BABAR data. We find a provisional lower limit on the inverse moment of the $B$ meson distribution amplitude, $\lambda_B$, which, due to the inclusion of radiative and power corrections, is significantly lower than the previous result. More data with large photon energy is, however, required to obtain reliable results, as should become available in the future from SuperB factories., Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures

These are the proceedings of the "Workshop on Precision Measurements of alphas" held at the Max-Planck-Institute for Physics, Munich, February 9-11, 2011. The workshop explored in depth the determination of alphas(mZ) in the MS-bar scheme from the key categories where high precision measurements are currently being made, including DIS and global PDF fits, tau-decays, electroweak precision observables and Z-decays, event-shapes, and lattice QCD. These proceedings contain a short summary contribution from the speakers, as well as the lists of authors, conveners, participants, and talks., Comment: Proceedings of the "Workshop on Precision Measurements of alphas", Feb. 9-11, 2011. v1: 75 pages; v3: 78 pages

We compute the total top-quark pair production cross section at the Tevatron and LHC based on approximate NNLO results, and on the summation of threshold logarithms and Coulomb enhancements to all orders with next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic (NNLL) accuracy, including bound-state effects. We find \sigma_{t\bar t} = 7.22^{+0.31+0.71}_{-0.47-0.55} pb at Tevatron and \sigma_{t\bar t} = 162.6^{+7.4+15.4}_{-7.6-14.7} pb at LHC with 7 TeV c.o.m. energy, for m_t=173.3 GeV. The implementation of joint soft and Coulomb resummation, its ambiguities, and the present theoretical uncertainty are discussed in detail. We further obtain new approximate results at N3LO., Comment: 55 pages, LaTeX, 13 figures

We consider electroweak symmetry breaking by a certain class of non-local Higgs sectors. Extending previous studies employing the Mandelstam condition, a straight Wilson line is used to make the Higgs action gauge invariant. We show the unitarization of vector-boson scattering for a wide class of non-local actions, but find that the Wilson-line model leads to tree-level corrections to electroweak precision observables, which restrict the parameter space of the model. We also find that Unhiggs models cannot address the hierarchy problem, once the parameters are expressed in terms of low-energy observables., Comment: 22 pages, 6 Figures

B-mode polarization of the cosmic background radiation is induced from purely scalar primordial sources at second order in perturbations of the homogeneous, isotropic universe. We calculate the B-mode angular power spectrum C_l^{BB} sourced by the second-order scattering term in the full second-order Boltzmann equations for the polarized radiation phase-space density, which have recently become available. We find that at l\approx 200 the second-order effect is comparable to the first-order effect for a tensor-to-scalar ratio of r=10^{-6}, and to about 2\cdot 10^{-4} at l\approx 1000. It is always negligible relative to the weak-lensing induced contribution., Comment: 32 pages

The production of W+ W- b bbar from e+ e- collisions at energies close to the t tbar threshold is dominated by the resonant process with a nearly on-shell t tbar intermediate state. The W b pairs in the final state can also be reached through the decay of off-shell tops or through background processes containing no or only single top quarks. This non-resonant production starts to contribute at NLO to the W+ W- b bbar total cross section in the non-relativistic power-counting v ~ alpha_s ~ sqrt(alpha_EW). The NLO non-resonant corrections presented in this talk represent the non-trivial NLO electroweak corrections to the e+ e- -> W+ W- b bbar cross section in the top anti-top resonance region. In contrast to the QCD corrections which have been calculated (almost) up to NNNLO, the parametrically larger NLO electroweak contributions have not been completely known so far, but are mandatory for the required accuracy at a future linear collider. We consider the total cross section of the e+ e- -> W+ W- b bbar process and additionally implement cuts on the invariant masses of the W+ b and W- bbar pairs., Comment: Talk presented at the 35th International Conference of High Energy Physics - ICHEP2010, July 22-28, 2010, Paris France. 4 pages, 2 figures

Pair production of massive coloured particles in hadron collisions is accompanied by potentially large radiative corrections related to the suppression of soft gluon emission and enhanced Coulomb exchange near the production threshold. We recently developed a framework to sum both series of corrections for the partonic cross section using soft-collinear and non-relativistic effective theory. If it can be argued that the resummed cross section approximates the complete result over a significant kinematic range, an improvement of the hadronic cross section results, even when the production is not kinematically constrained to the threshold. This is discussed here for the case of top quark production., Comment: 5 pages, to appear in: Proceedings of the 10th DESY Workshop on Elementary Particle Theory: Loops and Legs in Quantum Field Theory 2010, W\"orlitz, Germany, 25-30 Apr 2010

We perform the two-loop matching calculation for heavy-to-light currents from QCD onto soft-collinear effective theory for the complete set of Dirac structures. The newly obtained matching coefficients enter several phenomenological applications, of which we discuss heavy-to-light form factor ratios and exclusive radiative decays, as well as the semi-inclusive decay anti-B ---> X(s) l+ l-. For this decay, we observe a significant shift of the forward-backward asymmetry zero and find q_0^2 = (3.34 +0.22 -0.25) GeV^2 for an invariant mass cut m_X^cut=2.0 GeV., Comment: 38 pages, 5 figures. The renormalized form factors and matching coefficients are attached in electronic form to the source of the present submission

We analyse subleading electroweak effects in the top anti-top resonance production region in e+ e- collisions which arise due to the decay of the top and anti-top quarks into the W+ W- b bbar final state. These are NLO corrections adopting the non-relativistic power counting v ~ alpha_s ~ sqrt(alpha_EW). In contrast to the QCD corrections which have been calculated (almost) up to NNNLO, the parametrically larger NLO electroweak contributions have not been completely known so far, but are mandatory for the required accuracy at a future linear collider. The missing parts of these NLO contributions arise from matching coefficients of non-resonant production-decay operators in unstable-particle effective theory which correspond to off-shell top production and decay and other non-resonant irreducible background processes to t tbar production. We consider the total cross section of the e+ e- -> W+ W- b bbar process and additionally implement cuts on the invariant masses of the W+ b and W- bbar pairs., Comment: LaTeX, 33 pages, 6 figures

Non-gaussianity and B-mode polarization are particularly interesting features of the cosmic microwave background, as -- at least in the standard model of cosmology -- their only sources to first order in cosmological perturbation theory are primordial, possibly generated during inflation. If the primordial sources are small, the question arises how large is the non-gaussianity and B-mode background induced in second-order from the initially gaussian and scalar perturbations. In this paper we derive the Boltzmann hierarchy for the microwave background photon phase-space distributions at second order in cosmological perturbation theory including the complete polarization information, providing the basis for further numerical studies. As an aside we note that the second-order collision term contains new sources of B-mode polarization and that no polarization persists in the tight-coupling limit., Comment: LaTeX, 33 pages

We present results for a combined resummation of soft and Coloumb gluon corrections in squark-antisquark production at the LHC, including the non-trivial interference of the two effects and the contribution of squark-antisquark bound states below threshold. The total correction to the next-to-leading order approximation is found to be sizeable, and amounts to 5-14 % in the squark mass region 200 GeV-2 TeV. The scale dependence of the total cross section is also reduced., Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, to appear in the proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Radiative Corrections (RADCOR 2009), October 25-30 2009, Ascona, Switzerland

We consider the factorization and resummation of soft and Coulomb gluons for pair-production processes of heavy coloured particles at hadron colliders, and discuss: the construction of a colour basis that diagonalizes the leading soft function to all orders in perturbation theory; the determination of the two-loop soft anomalous dimension needed for NNLL resummations; and a general formula that provides all logarithmically enhanced O(alpha_s^2) correction requiring as process-independent input only the one-loop hard matching coefficients., Comment: 6 pages, to appear in the proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Radiative Corrections (RADCOR 2009), October 25-30 2009, Ascona, Switzerland

We derive the complete set of velocity-enhanced terms in the expansion of the total cross section for heavy-quark pair production in hadronic collisions at next-to-next-to-leading order. Our expression takes into account the effects of soft-gluon emission as well as that of potential-gluon exchanges. We prove that there are no enhancements due to subleading soft-gluon couplings multiplying the leading Coulomb singularity., Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures, published erratum included at the end of the paper, updated attached Mathematica file

The colour-suppressed tree amplitude in non-leptonic B decays is particularly sensitive to perturbative and non-perturbative corrections. We calculate the two-loop (NNLO) vertex corrections to the colour-suppressed and colour-allowed tree amplitudes in QCD factorization. Our results are given completely analytically, including the full dependence on the charm quark mass. We then update theoretical predictions for a range of interesting observables derived from pi pi, pi rho, and rho rho final states that do not depend (significantly) on penguin contributions, and hence are now available with NNLO accuracy. We observe good agreement with experimental data within experimental and theoretical errors, except for observables involving the pi^0 pi^0 branching fraction., Comment: 52 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables. Equations (42) and (84) are contained in electronic form in the source file of the present submission

One of the major challenges of particle physics has been to gain an in-depth understanding of the role of quark flavor and measurements and theoretical interpretations of their results have advanced tremendously: apart from masses and quantum numbers of flavor particles, there now exist detailed measurements of the characteristics of their interactions allowing stringent tests of Standard Model predictions. Among the most interesting phenomena of flavor physics is the violation of the CP symmetry that has been subtle and difficult to explore. Till early 1990s observations of CP violation were confined to neutral $K$ mesons, but since then a large number of CP-violating processes have been studied in detail in neutral $B$ mesons. In parallel, measurements of the couplings of the heavy quarks and the dynamics for their decays in large samples of $K, D$, and $B$ mesons have been greatly improved in accuracy and the results are being used as probes in the search for deviations from the Standard Model. In the near future, there will be a transition from the current to a new generation of experiments, thus a review of the status of quark flavor physics is timely. This report summarizes the results of the current generation of experiments that is about to be completed and it confronts these results with the theoretical understanding of the field., Comment: Report of the CKM workshop, Rome 9-13th Sep. 2008, 340 pages, 106 postscript figures, submitted to Phys. Repts

We present a factorization formula for the production of pairs of heavy coloured particles in hadronic collisions at the production threshold, which forms the basis for the resummation of soft gluons and Coulomb gluons. We construct a basis in colour space that diagonalizes the soft function appearing in the factorization formula to all orders in perturbation theory. This extends recent results on the structure of soft anomalous dimensions and allows us to determine an analytic expression for the two-loop soft anomalous dimension at threshold for all production processes of interest., Comment: 36 pages, LaTeX, 2 figures. v2 matches published version (improved discussion of NNLL resummation, note added on work by Ferroglia et al.)