Soft and Coulomb-gluon resummation in pair-production of heavy coloured particles

Pair-production of known (top quarks) or yet undiscovered (squarks, gluinos,...) heavy coloured particles will play an important role in the physics program of the LHC in the years to come. Unfortunately, a precise theoretical description of this class of processes is hampered by large corrections related to soft-gluon emission and enhanced Coulomb exchange near the production threshold. These terms can in principle lead to a breakdown of perturbation theory, and should ideally be resummed to all orders in the strong coupling constant $\alpha_s$. In this talk I will show how these two classes of corrections can be simultaneously resummed within a framework which involves soft-collinear and non-relativistic effective theories. As explicit and phenomenologically relevant applications of the formalism I will present results for the $t \bar{t}$ and squark-antisquark production cross sections.

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