Exponentiation of soft quark effects from the replica trick

Abstract

In this paper, we show that multiple maximally soft (anti-)quark and gluon emissions exponentiate at the level of either the amplitude or cross-section. We first show that such emissions can be captured by introducing new soft emission operators, which serve to generalise the well-known Wilson lines describing emissions of maximally soft gluons. Next, we prove that vacuum expectation values of these operators exponentiate using the replica trick, a statistical-physics argument that has previously been used to demonstrate soft-gluon exponentiation properties in QCD. The obtained results are general, i.e. not tied to a particular scattering process. We illustrate our arguments by demonstrating the exponentiation of certain real and virtual corrections affecting subleading partonic channels in deep-inelastic scattering.