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 figure

We consider the total production cross section of heavy coloured particle pairs in hadronic collisions at the production threshold. We construct a basis in colour space that diagonalizes to all orders in perturbation theory the soft function, which appears in a new factorization formula for the combined resummation of soft gluon and Coulomb gluon effects. 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.

We derive a factorization formula for the production of pairs of heavy coloured particles in hadronic collisions near the production threshold that establishes factorization of soft and Coulomb effects. This forms the basis for a combined resummation of Coulomb and soft corrections, including the non-trivial interference of the two effects. We develop a resummation formalism valid at NNLL accuracy using the momentum-space approach to soft gluon resummation. We present numerical results for the NLL resummed squark-antisquark production cross section at the LHC and Tevatron, including also the contribution of squark-antisquark bound states below threshold. The total correction on top of the next-to-leading order approximation is found to be sizeable, and amounts to (4-20)% in the squark mass region 200 GeV -3 TeV at the 14 TeV LHC. The scale dependence of the total cross section is also reduced.

A precise theoretical description of W-and Z-boson production in the resonance region is essential for the correct interpretation of high-precision measurements of the W-boson mass and the effective weak mixing angle. Currently, the largest unknown fixed-order contribution is given by the mixed QCD-electroweak corrections of O(α s α). We argue, using the framework of the pole expansion for the NNLO QCD-electroweak corrections established in a previous paper, that the numerically dominant corrections arise from the combination of large QCD corrections to the production with the large electroweak corrections to the decay of the W/Z boson. We calculate these so-called factorizable corrections of "initial-final" type and estimate the impact on the W-boson mass extraction. We compare our results to simpler approximate combinations of electroweak and QCD corrections in terms of naive products of NLO QCD and electroweak correction factors and using leading-logarithmic approximations for QED final-state radiation as provided by the structure-function approach or QED parton-shower programs. We also compute corrections of "final-final" type, which are given by finite counterterms to the leptonic vectorboson decays and are found to be numerically negligible.