The Singular Structure of Rapidity Distributions for Color-Singlet Production at N3LO

Abstract

We determine the universal singular structure of rapidity distributions for color-singlet production in hadron collisions through next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order (N3LO) in QCD. Our result captures the full singular contributions as either partonic momentum fraction approaches one, including the delta-function terms, while retaining the exact dependence on the other. The essential new ingredient is the complete calculation of the three-loop quark and gluon rapidity beam-function matching kernels. Our calculation is based on the strict collinear expansion of the partonic cross sections for Higgs boson and Drell-Yan production. We represent our results in terms of generalized polylogarithms as well as numerical series expansions. The resulting N3LO partonic coefficient functions apply to arbitrary color-singlet production processes with the process dependence entering through the hard function, which encodes the virtual corrections to the Born process.