Electroweak two-loop Sudakov logarithms for on-shell fermions and bosons

We calculate the virtual electroweak Sudakov (double) logarithms at one- and two-loop level for arbitrary on-shell/on-resonance particles in the Standard Model. The associated Sudakov form factors apply in a universal way to arbitrary non-mass-suppressed electroweak processes at high energies, although this universality has to be interpreted with care. The actual calculation is performed in the temporal Coulomb gauge, where the relevant contributions from collinear-soft gauge-boson exchange are contained exclusively in the self-energies of the external on-shell/on-resonance particles. In view of the special status of the time-like components in this gauge, a careful analysis of the asymptotic states of the theory is required. From this analysis we derive an all-order version of the Goldstone-boson Equivalence Theorem without the need for finite compensation factors. By exploiting conditions obtained from non-renormalization requirements, which are a consequence of our choice of gauge, we show that the Sudakov corrections can be extracted through a combination of energy derivatives and projections by means of external sources. We observe that the Standard Model behaves dynamically like an unbroken theory in the Sudakov limit, in spite of the fact that the explicit particle masses are needed at the kinematical (phase-space) level while calculating the Sudakov form factors. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.