QCD Prediction for Heavy Boson Transverse Momentum Distributions

Abstract

We investigate the predictive power of the Collins, Soper, and Sterman b-space QCD resummation formalism for transverse momentum ( Q(T)) distributions of heavy boson production in hadronic collisions. We show that the predictive power has a strong dependence on the collision energy sqrt[S] in addition to its well known Q2 dependence, and the sqrt[S] dependence improves the predictive power at collider energies. We demonstrate that, at the Fermilab Tevatron and the CERN LHC energies, the Q(T) distributions derived from b-space resummation are not sensitive to the nonperturbative input at large b, and give good descriptions of the Q(T) distributions of heavy boson production at all transverse momenta Q(T)< or =Q.