The Diphoton $q_T$ spectrum at N$^3$LL$^\prime$+NNLO

Abstract

We present a $q_T$-resummed calculation of diphoton production at order N$^3$LL$^\prime$+NNLO. To reach the primed level of accuracy we have implemented the recently published three-loop $\mathcal{O}(\alpha_s^3)$ virtual corrections in the $q\bar{q}$ channel and the three-loop transverse momentum dependent beam functions and combined them with the existing infrastructure of CuTe-MCFM, a code performing resummation at order N$^3$LL. While the primed predictions are parametrically not more accurate, one typically observes from lower orders and other processes that they are the dominant effect of the next order. We include in both the $q\bar{q}$ and loop-induced $gg$ channel the hard contributions consistently together at order $\alpha_s^3$ and find that the resummed $q\bar{q}$ channel without matching stabilizes indeed. Due to large matching corrections and large contributions and uncertainties from the $gg$ channel, the overall improvements are small though. We furthermore study the effect of hybrid-cone photon isolation and hard-scale choice on our fully matched results to describe the ATLAS 8 TeV data and find that the hybrid-cone isolation destroys agreement at small $q_T$.