Infrared safety in factorized hard scattering cross-sections

The rules of soft-collinear effective theory can be used naively to write hard scattering cross-sections as convolutions of separate hard, jet, and soft functions. One condition required to guarantee the validity of such a factorization is the infrared safety of these functions in perturbation theory. Using e(+)e(-) angularity distributions as an example, we propose and illustrate an intuitive method to test this infrared safety at one loop. We look for regions of integration in the sum of Feymnan diagrams contributing to the jet and soft functions where the integrals become infrared divergent. Our analysis is independent of an explicit infrared regulator, clarifies how to distinguish infrared and ultraviolet singularities in pure dimensional regularization, and demonstrates the necessity of taking zero-bins into account to obtain infrared-safe jet functions. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.