Transverse momentum dependent parton distributions (TMDPDFs) which appear in factorized cross sections involve infinite Wilson lines with edges on or close to the light-cone. Since these TMDPDFs are not directly calculable with a Euclidean path integral in lattice QCD, we study the construction of quasi-TMDPDFs with finite-length spacelike Wilson lines that are amenable to such calculations. We define an infrared consistency test to determine which quasi-TMDPDF definitions are related to the TMDPDF, by carrying out a one-loop study of infrared logarithms of transverse position b T ∼ Λ −1 QCD , which must agree between them. This agreement is a necessary condition for the two quantities to be related by perturbative matching. TMDPDFs necessarily involve combining a hadron matrix element, which nominally depends on a single light-cone direction, with soft matrix elements that necessarily depend on two light-cone directions. We show at one loop that the simplest definitions of the quasi hadron matrix element, the quasi soft matrix element, and the resulting quasi-TMDPDF all fail the infrared consistency test. Ratios of impact parameter quasi-TMDPDFs still provide nontrivial information about the TMDPDFs, and are more robust since the soft matrix elements cancel. We show at one loop that such quasi ratios can be matched to ratios of the corresponding TMDPDFs. We also introduce a modified "bent" quasi soft matrix element which yields a quasi-TMDPDF that passes the consistency test with the TMDPDF at one loop, and discuss potential issues at higher orders.

A number of important observables exhibit logarithms in their perturbative description that are induced by emissions at widely separated rapidities. These include transverse-momentum (q T ) logarithms, logarithms involving heavy-quark or electroweak gauge boson masses, and small-x logarithms. In this paper, we initiate the study of rapidity logarithms, and the associated rapidity divergences, at subleading order in the power expansion. This is accomplished using the soft collinear effective theory (SCET). We discuss the structure of subleading-power rapidity divergences and how to consistently regulate them. We introduce a new pure rapidity regulator and a corresponding MS-like scheme, which handles rapidity divergences while maintaining the homogeneity of the power expansion. We find that power-law rapidity divergences appear at subleading power, which give rise to derivatives of parton distribution functions. As a concrete example, we consider the q T spectrum for colorsinglet production, for which we compute the complete q 2 T /Q 2 suppressed power corrections at O(α s ), including both logarithmic and nonlogarithmic terms. Our results also represent an important first step towards carrying out a resummation of subleading-power rapidity logarithms.

At small transverse momentum qT , transverse-momentum dependent parton distribution functions (TMDPDFs) arise as genuinely nonperturbative objects that describe Drell-Yan like processes in hadron collisions as well as semi-inclusive deep-inelastic scattering. TMDPDFs naturally depend on the hadron momentum, and the associated evolution is determined by the Collins-Soper equation. For qT ∼ ΛQCD the corresponding evolution kernel (or anomalous dimension) is nonperturbative and must be determined as an independent ingredient in order to relate TMDPDFs at different scales. We propose a method to extract this kernel using lattice QCD and the Large-Momentum Effective Theory, where the physical TMD correlation involving light-like paths is approximated by a quasi-TMDPDF, defined using equal-time correlation functions with a large-momentum hadron state. The kernel is determined from a ratio of quasi-TMDPDFs extracted at different hadron momenta.

We compute the quark and gluon transverse momentum dependent parton distribution functions at next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order (N3LO) in perturbative QCD. Our calculation is based on an expansion of the differential Drell-Yan and gluon fusion Higgs production cross sections about their collinear limit. This method allows us to employ cutting edge multiloop techniques for the computation of cross sections to extract these universal building blocks of the collinear limit of QCD. The corresponding perturbative matching kernels for all channels are expressed in terms of simple harmonic polylogarithms up to weight five. As a byproduct, we confirm a previous computation of the soft function for transverse momentum factorization at N3LO. Our results are the last missing ingredient to extend the qT subtraction methods to N3LO and to obtain resummed qT spectra at N3LL′ accuracy both for gluon as well as for quark initiated processes.

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We consider Drell-Yan production pp → V*X → LX at small qT ≪ Q, where qT and Q are the total transverse momentum and invariant mass of the leptonic final state L. Experimental measurements require fiducial cuts on L, which in general introduce enhanced, linear power corrections in qT/Q. We show that they can be unambiguously predicted from factorization, and resummed to the same order as the leading-power contribution. For the fiducial qT spectrum, they constitute the complete linear power corrections. We thus obtain predictions for the fiducial qT spectrum to N3LL and next-to-leading-power in qT/Q. Matching to full NNLO ($$ {\alpha}_s^2 $$ α s 2 ), we find that the linear power corrections are indeed the dominant ones, and once included by factorization, the remaining fixed-order corrections become almost negligible below qT ≲ 40 GeV. We also discuss the implications for more complicated observables, and provide predictions for the fiducial ϕ* spectrum at N3LL+NNLO. We find excellent agreement with ATLAS and CMS measurements of qT and ϕ*. We also consider the $$ {p}_T^{\mathrm{\ell}} $$ p T ℓ spectrum. We show that it develops leptonic power corrections in qT/(Q − 2$$ {p}_T^{\mathrm{\ell}} $$ p T ℓ ), which diverge near the Jacobian peak $$ {p}_T^{\mathrm{\ell}} $$ p T ℓ ∼ Q/2 and must be kept to all powers to obtain a meaningful result there. Doing so, we obtain for the first time an analytically resummed result for the $$ {p}_T^{\mathrm{\ell}} $$ p T ℓ spectrum around the Jacobian peak at N3LL+NNLO. Our method is based on performing a complete tensor decomposition for hadronic and leptonic tensors. We show that in practice this is equivalent to often-used recoil prescriptions, for which our results now provide rigorous, formal justification. Our tensor decomposition yields nine Lorentz-scalar hadronic structure functions, which for Z/γ* → ℓℓ or W → ℓν directly map onto the commonly used angular coefficients, but also holds for arbitrary leptonic final states. In particular, for suitably defined Born-projected leptons it still yields a LO-like angular decomposition even when including QED final-state radiation. Finally, we also discuss the application to qT subtractions. Including the unambiguously predicted fiducial power corrections significantly improves their performance, and in particular makes them applicable near kinematic edges where they otherwise break down due to large leptonic power corrections.

We continue the study of power corrections for N-jettiness subtractions by analytically computing the complete next-to-leading power corrections at O(α s) for colorsinglet production. This includes all nonlogarithmic terms and all partonic channels for Drell-Yan and gluon-fusion Higgs production. These terms are important to further improve the numerical performance of the subtractions, and to better understand the structure of power corrections beyond their leading logarithms, in particular their universality. We emphasize the importance of computing the power corrections differential in both the invariant mass, Q, and rapidity, Y , of the color-singlet system, which is necessary to account for the rapidity dependence in the subtractions. This also clarifies apparent disagreements in the literature. Performing a detailed numerical study, we find excellent agreement of our analytic results with a previous numerical extraction.

Differential spectra in observables that resolve additional soft or collinear QCD emissions exhibit Sudakov double logarithms in the form of logarithmic plus distributions. Important examples are the total transverse momentum q T in color-singlet production, N -jettiness (with thrust or beam thrust as special cases), but also jet mass and more complicated jet substructure observables. The all-order logarithmic structure of such distributions is often fully encoded in differential equations, so-called (renormalization group) evolution equations. We introduce a well-defined technique of distributional scale setting, which allows one to treat logarithmic plus distributions like ordinary logarithms when solving these differential equations. In particular, this allows one (through canonical scale choices) to minimize logarithmic contributions in the boundary terms of the solution, and to obtain the full distributional logarithmic structure from the solution's evolution kernel directly in distribution space. We apply this technique to the q T distribution, where the two-dimensional nature of convolutions leads to additional difficulties (compared to one-dimensional cases like thrust), and for which the resummation in distribution (or momentum) space has been a long-standing open question. For the first time, we show how to perform the RG evolution fully in momentum space, thereby directly resumming the logarithms [ln n (q 2 T /Q 2 )/q 2 T ] + appearing in the physical q T distribution. The resummation accuracy is then solely determined by the perturbative expansion of the associated anomalous dimensions.