Renormalization group approach to soft gluon resummation

We present a simple proof of the all-order exponentiation of soft logarithmic corrections to hard processes in perturbative QCD. Our argument is based on proving that all large logs in the soft limit can be expressed in terms of a single dimensionful variable, and then using the renormalization group to resum them. Beyond the next-to-leading log level, our result is somewhat less predictive than previous all-order resummation formulae, but it does not rely on non-standard factorization, and it is thus possibly more general, We use our result to settle issues of convergence of the resummed series, we discuss scheme dependence at the resummed level. and we provide explicit resummed expressions in various factorization schemes. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.