QCD prediction for heavy boson transverse momentum distributions

Abstract

We investigate the predictive power of Collins, Soper, and Sterman's $b$-space QCD resummation formalism for transverse momentum ($Q_T$) distributions of heavy boson production in hadronic collisions. We show that the predictive power of the resummation formalism has a strong dependence on the collision energy $\sqrt{S}$ in addition to its well-known $Q^2$ dependence, and the $\sqrt{S}$ dependence improves the predictive power at collider energies. We demonstrate that at Tevatron and the LHC energies, the $Q_T$ distributions derived from $b$-space resummation are not sensitive to the nonperturbative input at large $b$, and give good descriptions of the $Q_T$ distributions of heavy boson production at all transverse momenta $Q_T \leq Q$.