Two-loop soft anomalous dimensions and NNLL resummation for heavy quark production

Abstract

I present results for two-loop soft anomalous dimensions for heavy quark production which control soft-gluon resummation at next-to-next-to-leading-logarithm (NNLL) accuracy. I derive an explicit expression for the exact result and study it numerically for top quark production via e+ e- -> t tbar, and I construct a surprisingly simple but very accurate approximation. I show that the two-loop soft anomalous dimensions with massive quarks display a simple proportionality relation to the one-loop result only in the limit of vanishing quark mass. I also discuss the extension of the calculation to single top and top pair production in hadron colliders.