Power corrections and renormalons in Drell-Yan production Original Research Article

The resummed Drell-Yan cross section in the double-logarithmic approximation suffers from infrared renormalons. Their presence was interpreted as an indication for non-perturbative corrections of order ΛQCD/(Q(1 − z)). We find that, once soft gluon emission is accurately taken into account, the leading renormalon divergence is cancelled by higher-order perturbative contributions in the exponent of the resummed cross section. From this evidence, “higher twist” corrections to the hard cross section in Drell-Yan production should intervene only at order Λ2QCD/(Q2(1 − z)2) in the entire perturbative domain Q(1 − z) > ΛQCD. We compare this result with hadronic event shape variables, comment on the potential universality of non-perturbative corrections to resummed cross sections, and on possible implications for phenomenology.