Soft-gluon resummation for high-pT inclusive-hadron production at COMPASS

One of the experiments that may be used to probe the nucleon's gluon distribution is the fixed-target lepton scattering experiment COMPASS at CERN, where charged hadrons with high transverse momentum are observed. An aspect that makes the COMPASS experiment quite challenging for the theoretical calculation in perturbative QCD is its fixed-target regime. The hadron's transverse momentum is relatively large compared to the available center-of-mass energy. Thus the partonic process is close to the threshold, where all available partonic center-of-mass energy is just used to produce the high-transverse momentum parton that subsequently hadronizes into the observed hadron, and its recoiling counterpart. Additional real gluon radiation is strongly suppressed and therefore mostly constrained to the emission of soft and/or collinear gluons. This results in a strong imbalance between real and virtual gluon diagrams and the cancellation of infrared singularities leaves behind large logarithmic corrections to the leading order cross section. These logarithms are not only present in the next-to-leading (NLO) corrections, but appear also in all higher order corrections in its perturbation expansion. They dominate the cross section in the kinematic region close to the threshold and thus have to be taken into account order-by-order. A technique that addresses these logarithms is known as threshold resummation. The main goal of this work is to investigate the relevance of higher-order QCD corrections of the unpolarized photoproduction reaction in fixed-target scattering at COMPASS, where the hadron is produced at large transverse momentum. In particular the large logarithmic threshold corrections to the partonic cross sections are addressed, which are resummed to all orders at next-to-leading logarithmic (NLL) accuracy. As new technical ingredient to resummation, the rapidity dependence of the cross section in the resummed calculation is fully included in order to account for all relevant experimental kinematic cuts. In the comparison of the resummed cross section to the experimental data of the COMPASS experiment it turns out that the threshold contributions are large and improve the agreement between data and theoretical prediction significantly.