Universality of transverse-momentum resummation and hard factors at the NNLO

We consider QCD radiative corrections to the production of colorless high-mass systems in hadron collisions. The logarithmically-enhanced contributions at small transverse momentum are treated to all perturbative orders by a universal resummation formula that depends on a single process-dependent hard factor. We show that the hard factor is directly related to the all-order virtual amplitude of the corresponding partonic process. The direct relation is universal (process-independent), and it is expressed by an all-order factorization formula that we explicitly evaluate up to the next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in QCD perturbation theory. Once the NNLO scattering amplitude is available, the corresponding hard factor is directly determined: it controls NNLO contributions in resummed calculations at full next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy, and it can be used in applications of the qT subtraction formalism to perform fully-exclusive perturbative calculations up to NNLO. The universality structure of the hard factor and its explicit NNLO form are also extended to the related formalism of threshold resummation. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).