Soft radiation in heavy-particle pair production: All-order colour structure and two-loop anomalous dimension

We consider the total production cross section of heavy coloured particle pairs in hadronic collisions at the production threshold. We construct a basis in colour space that diagonalizes to all orders in perturbation theory the soft function, which appears in a new factorization formula for the combined resummation of soft gluon and Coulomb gluon effects. This extends recent results on the structure of soft anomalous dimensions and allows Lis to determine an analytic expression for the two-loop soft anomalous dimension at threshold for all production processes of interest. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.