What is the Real K Factor?

Abstract

The theoretical K factor, describing the difference between the leading and higher order cross sections, has no precise definition. The definition is sensitive to the order of the fit to the parton densities and the number of loops at which alpha_s is evaluated. We describe alternate ways to define the K factor and show how the definition affects its magnitude and shape for examples of hadroproduction of W^+ bosons, Drell-Yan lepton pairs, and heavy quarks. We discuss which definition is appropriate under certain circumstances.

25 pages, uses special included style file, 14 eps figures, submitted to Heavy Ion Physics

References in corpus (6)

• High $p_T$ Azimuthal Asymmetry in Non-central A+A at RHIC
• Quarkonium Production at High-Energy Colliders
• Measurement of single electrons and implications for charm production in Au+Au collisions at sqrt(s_NN)= 130 GeV
• Is There a Significant Excess in Bottom Hadroproduction at the Tevatron?
• Gluon Shadowing and Hadron Production at RHIC
• Sudakov Resummation and Finite Order Expansions of Heavy Quark Hadroproduction Cross Sections

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• Measurement of Anti-Deuteron Photoproduction and a Search for Heavy Stable Charged Particles at HERA
• Threshold corrections in bottom and charm quark hadroproduction at next-to-next-to-leading order
• Heavy Flavor Azimuthal Correlations in Cold Nuclear Matter
• Search for new physics in the lepton plus missing transverse momentum final state in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}=$ 13 TeV
• Threshold Effects in Charm Hadroproduction
• Open and Hidden Charm Production at RHIC and LHC
• Enhancement of charm quark production due to nonlinear corrections to the DGLAP equations
• D meson enhancement in pp collisions at the LHC due to nonlinear gluon evolution
• ${\Xi }^{-}$ and $\Omega$ Distributions in Hadron-Nucleus Interactions
• Open and Hidden Charm Production in d$A$ Collisions at RHIC and LHC