Soft and Jet functions for SCET at four loops in QCD

Abstract

Soft-Collinear Effective Theory is a framework for systematically organizing and resumming the logarithmic contributions that occur in high-energy reactions. It provides a factorized description of cross sections in terms of hard, jet, soft, and beam functions. As the latter are universal, they can be obtained from the well-known perturbative results in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) for deep-inelastic scattering, Drell-Yan and Higgs boson productions. Using the recent results ~\cite{Kniehl:2025ttz} on four-loop eikonal $(f^I)$ and collinear anomalous dimensions $(B^I)$ for quarks and gluons, $I=q,g$, as well as perturbative results from previous orders, we present four-loop predictions for the quark and gluon soft and jet functions. They constitute an important component of the $N$-jettiness subtraction method at ${\mathrm{N}}^4\mathrm{LO}$ accuracy in QCD, which eventually may enable the calculation of fully-differential cross sections at higher orders.

Comments: 25 pages, 4 ancillary files