The singular behavior of massive QCD amplitudes

Abstract

We discuss the structure of infrared singularities in on-shell QCD amplitudes with massive partons and present a general factorization formula in the limit of small parton masses. The factorization formula gives rise to an all-order exponentiation of both, the soft poles in dimensional regularization and the large collinear logarithms of the parton masses. Moreover, it provides a universal relation between any on-shell amplitude with massive external partons and its corresponding massless amplitude. For the form factor of a heavy quark we present explicit results including the fixed-order expansion up to three loops in the small mass limit. For general scattering processes we show how our constructive method applies to the computation of all singularities as well as the constant (mass-independent) terms of a generic massive n-parton QCD amplitude up to the next-to-next-to-leading order corrections.