Jet Regions from Event Shapes and the N-Jet Soft Function at Hadron Colliders

Abstract: The N-jettiness event shape divides phase space into N+2 regions, each containing one jet or beam. These jet regions are insensitive to the distribution of soft radiation and, with a geometric measure for N-jettiness, have circular boundaries. We give a factorization theorem for the cross section which is fully differential in the mass of each jet, and compute the corresponding soft function at next-to-leading order (NLO). For N-jettiness, all ingredients are now available to extend NLO cross sections to resummed predictions at next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic order.