Enhanced non-perturbative effects through the collinear anomaly

Abstract

We show that non-perturbative effects are logarithmically enhanced for transverse-momentum-dependent observables such as q_T-spectra of electroweak bosons in hadronic collisions and jet broadening at e^+e^- colliders. This enhancement arises from the collinear anomaly, a mechanism characteristic for transverse observables, which induces logarithmic dependence on the hard scale in the product of the soft and collinear matrix elements. Our analysis is based on an operator product expansion and provides, for the first time, a systematic, model-independent way to study non-perturbative effects for this class of observables. For the case of jet broadening, we relate the leading correction to the non-perturbative shift of the thrust distribution.