Particles, Astrophysics, and Nuclear Physics Seminar

Many observables in QCD rely upon the resummation of perturbation theory to retain predictive power. Resummation follows after one factorizes the cross section into the relevant modes. The class of observables which are sensitive to soft recoil effects are particularly challenging to factorize and resum since they involve rapidity logarithms. Such observables include: transverse momentum distributions at pT much less then the high energy scattering scale, jet broadening, exclusive hadroproduction and decay, as well as the Sudakov form factor. I will present a formalism which allows one to factorize and resum the perturbative series for such observables in a systematic fashion through the notion of a “rapidity renormalization group”. That is, a Collin-Soper like equation is realized as a renormalization group equation, but has a more universal applicability to observables beyond the traditional transverse momentum dependent parton distribution functions (TMDPDFs) and the Sudakov form factor.