A new prescription for soft gluon resummation

Abstract

We present a new prescription for the resummation of the divergent series of perturbative corrections, due to soft gluon emission, to hard processes near threshold in perturbative QCD (threshold resummation). This prescription is based on Borel resummation, and contrary to the commonly used minimal prescription, it does not introduce a dependence of resummed physical observables on the kinematically unaccessible x->0 region of parton distributions. We compare results for resummed deep-inelastic scattering obtained using the Borel prescription and the minimal prescription and exploit the comparison to discuss the ambiguities related to the resummation procedure.

Comments: 15 pages, 3 figures. Final version, to be published in Phys. Lett. B. Several typos corrected (in particular eqs 26,41,53); fig. 3 added