The NNLO soft function for N-jettiness in hadronic collisions

Abstract

We compute the N-jettiness soft function in hadronic collisions to next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in the strong-coupling expansion. Our calculation is based on an extension of the SoftSERVE framework to soft functions that involve an arbitrary number of lightlike Wilson lines. We present numerical results for 1-jettiness and 2-jettiness, and illustrate that our formalism carries over to a generic number of jets by calculating a few benchmark points for 3-jettiness. We also perform a detailed analytic study of the asymptotic behaviour of the soft-function coefficients at the edges of phase space, when one of the jets becomes collinear to another jet or beam direction, and comment on previous calculations of the N-jettiness soft function.

Comments: 61 pages, 14 figures, ancillary file containing numerical result grids included, published version