Sudakov Resummation Effects in Prompt-Photon Hadroproduction

Abstract

We compute the effects of soft-gluon resummation, at the next-to-leading-logarithmic level, in the fixed-target hadroproduction cross section for prompt photons. We find in general that the corrections to the fixed next-to-leading-order results are large for large renormalization scales, and small for small scales. This leads to a significant reduction of the scale dependence of the results for most experimental configurations of interest. We compare our results to the recent measurements by the E706 and UA6 collaborations.