Soft contributions to heavy quark production in arbitrary kinematics

Abstract

We present the computation of the soft-parton contribution at low transverse momentum for the production of a heavy quark pair in association with a colour singlet at the next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in the QCD coupling. This paper extends to arbitrary kinematics previous results obtained under the assumption of a back-to-back configuration for the final-state emitters. These new results take into account the production of an additional colour singlet system, thus allowing for the evaluation of the resummation formula for associated heavy-quark pair production at NNLO, and the implementation of the qT subtraction formalism for this class of processes. We provide the results in the form of a code for their on-the-fly evaluation.