Master thesis

Abstract

Precision physics is nowadays considered to be the key to understand many unknown aspects of the phenomenology beyond the Standard Model (SM) and, in the next future, with the coming, for instance, of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) phase III, the experimental precision will considerably increase. This requires the theoretical precision to improve as well, at least at the same level, in order to make the distinction between Standard Model and new physic signals possible. This thesis arises in this framework and, in particular, in the context of precision predictions on hadron collider processes. The most relevant contribution to such processes is given by QCD but, in some kinematical regimes, it can not be treated in a standard perturbative way because of the appearance of non-perturbative mass logarithmic terms. In these cases, in order to obtain accurate phenomenological predictions, it is necessary to resum such terms to all orders. The main goal of this thesis is then the construction of a method to include mass-power corrections to the results obtained trough the resummation, in such a way to obtain a prediction that is reliable in a wide kinematic region. This method is completely general but, for clarity sake, it is applied to deep-inelastic scattering and, in particular, to the proton electromagnetic structure functions. The final predictions for such observables are obtained with different prescriptions, some of which constitute the original proposal of this thesis, and their consequences are analyzed in detail. Moreover, the proposal of this thesis will soon make possible to treat the N3LO deep-inelastic scattering and so it will give access to the next generation of the parton distribution functions (PDFs).

Thesis

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