Resummation of Jet Mass at Hadron Colliders

Abstract

A method is developed for calculating the jet mass distribution at hadron colliders using an expansion about the kinematic threshold. In particular, we consider the mass distribution of jets of size R produced in association with a hard photon at the Large Hadron Collider. Expanding around the kinematic threshold, where all the energy goes into the jet and the photon, provides a clean factorization formula and allows for the resummation of logarithms associated with soft and collinear divergences. All of the large logarithms of jet mass are resummed at next-to-leading logarithmic level, and all the global logarithms at next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic level. A key step in the derivation is the factorization of the soft function into pieces associated with single scales and a remainder which contains nonglobal structure. This step, which is standard in traditional resummation, is implemented in effective field theory which is then used to resum the large logarithms using the renormalization group in a systematically improvable manner.