Borel resummation of transverse momentum distributions

We present a new prescription for the resummation of contributions due to soft gluon emission to the transverse momentum distribution of processes such as Drell-Yan production in hadronic collisions. We show that familiar difficulties in obtaining resummed results as a function of transverse momentum starting from impact-parameter space resummation are related to the divergence of the perturbative expansion of the momentum-space result. We construct a resummed expression by Borel resummation of this divergent series, removing the divergence in the Borel inversion through the inclusion of a suitable higher twist term. The ensuing resummation prescription is free of numerical instabilities, is stable upon the inclusion of subleading terms, and the original divergent perturbative series is asymptotic to it. We compare our results to those obtained using alternative prescriptions, and discuss the ambiguities related to the resummation procedure. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.