Renormalization group approach to Sudakov resummation in prompt photon production

Abstract

We prove the all-order exponentiation of soft logarithmic corrections to prompt photon production in hadronic collisions, by generalizing an approach previously developed in the context of Drell-Yan production and deep-inelastic scattering. We show that all large logs in the soft limit can be expressed in terms of two dimensionful variables, and we use the renormalization group to resum them. The resummed results that we obtain are more general though less predictive than those proposed by other groups, in that they can accommodate for violations of Sudakov factorization.

21 pages, no figures. Final version to be published in Nucl. Phys. B. Discussion on colour structure added (eqs.(3.17)-(3.18))