Single top quark production at the Tevatron: threshold resummation and finite-order soft gluon corrections

Abstract

I present a calculation of threshold soft-gluon corrections to single top quark production in ppbar collisions via all partonic processes in the t and s channels and via associated top quark and W boson production. The soft-gluon corrections are formally resummed to all orders, and finite-order expansions of the resummed cross section are calculated through next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order (NNNLO) at next-to-leading logarithmic (NLL) accuracy. Numerical results for single top quark production at the Tevatron are presented, including the dependence of the cross sections on the top quark mass and on the factorization and renormalization scales. The threshold corrections in the t channel are small while in the s channel they are large and dominant. Associated tW production remains relatively minor due to the small leading-order cross section even though the K factors are large.