Systematic treatment of endpoint divergences beyond leading-logarithmic accuracy

Develop a systematic treatment of endpoint divergences in Soft-Collinear Effective Theory convolutions beyond leading-logarithmic accuracy, thereby enabling next-to-leading-power resummation beyond the currently accessible leading-logarithmic level.

Background

At next-to-leading power, Soft-Collinear Effective Theory factorization involves convolutions between collinear and soft functions that can diverge at endpoint configurations. Although subtraction procedures have enabled leading-logarithmic next-to-leading-power resummation for several processes, the paper states that a systematic treatment beyond leading-logarithmic accuracy is not yet available.

The authors identify this unresolved issue as the principal open problem on the Soft-Collinear Effective Theory side of next-to-leading-power resummation. Resolving it is necessary for applying renormalization-group methods systematically at higher logarithmic accuracy.

References

Beyond LL, however, a systematic treatment of endpoint divergences is still missing, and constitutes the main open problem on the SCET side.

— Jet functions for next-to-leading power factorization  (2608.14382 - Bijleveld et al., 14 Aug 2026) in Section 5, Conclusions

Understanding the structure of radiative jets with multiple soft-gluon emissions therefore represents a key open problem for the NLP programme in direct QCD.

— Jet functions for next-to-leading power factorization  (2608.14382 - Bijleveld et al., 14 Aug 2026) in Section 5, Conclusions