Virtual amplitudes and threshold behaviour of hadronic top-quark pair-production cross sections

Abstract

We present the two-loop virtual amplitudes for the production of a top-quark pair in gluon fusion. The evaluation method is based on a numerical solution of differential equations for master integrals in function of the quark velocity and scattering angle starting from a boundary at high-energy. The results are given for the renormalized infrared finite remainders on a large grid and have recently been used in the calculation of the total cross sections at the next-to-next-to-leading order. For convenience, we also give the known results for the quark annihilation case on the same grid. Outside of the kinematical range covered by the grid, we provide threshold and high-energy expansions. From expansions of the two-loop virtual amplitudes, we determine the threshold behavior of the total cross sections at next-to-next-to-leading order for the quark annihilation and gluon fusion channels including previously unknown constant terms. In our analysis of the quark annihilation channel, we uncover the presence of a velocity enhanced logarithm of Coulombic origin, which was missed in a previous study. © 2014 The Authors.