Electroweak radiative corrections at high energies

Abstract

This PhD thesis is concerned with one-loop virtual electroweak corrections to arbitrary processes in the high-energy limit. Complete results are presented for the leading and subleading logarithms of large ratios of energy scales to mass scales. These results include the logarithmic dependence on the photon and weak-boson masses, on the light-fermion masses, as well as on the Higgs- and top-masses in the heavy-Higgs and heavy-top limit. All sources of electroweak logarithmic corrections are taken into account, including the exchange of soft and/or collinear electroweak gauge bosons as well as the renormalization-group running of the gauge, scalar and Yukawa couplings. The logarithmic corrections are derived in a process-independent way, resulting in simple analytic formulas that apply to arbitrary electroweak processes that are not mass-suppressed in the high-energy limit. We also present analytical and numerical applications for the processes: e^+e^- \to f\bar{f}, e^+ e^- \to W^+W^-, ZZ, Z\gamma, \gamma\gamma and \bar{d}u \to W^+Z, W^+\gamma.