We investigate the production of highly energetic top-quark pairs at hadroncolliders, focusing on the case where the invariant mass of the pair is muchlarger than the mass of the top quark. In particular, we set up a factorizationformalism appropriate for describing the differential partonic cross section inthe double soft and small-mass limit, and explain how to resum simultaneouslylogarithmic corrections arising from soft gluon emission and from the ratio ofthe pair-invariant mass to that of the top quark to next-to-next-to-leadinglogarithmic accuracy. We explore the implications of our results on approximatenext-to-next-to-leading order formulas for the differential cross section inthe soft limit, pointing out that they offer a simplified calculationalprocedure for determining the currently unknown delta-function terms in thelimit of high invariant mass.
展开▼
