Threshold resummation at N3LL accuracy and soft-virtual cross sections at N3LO

We consider QCD radiative corrections to the production of colorless high-mass systems in hadron collisions. We show that the recent computation of the soft-virtual corrections to Higgs boson production at (NLO)-L-3 [1] together with the universality structure of soft-gluon emission can be exploited to extract the general expression of the hard-virtual coefficient that contributes to threshold resummation at (NLL)-L-3 accuracy. The hard-virtual coefficient is directly related to the process-dependent virtual amplitude through a universal (process-independent) factorization formula that we explicitly evaluate up to three-loop order. As an application, we present the explicit expression of the soft-virtual (NLO)-L-3 corrections for the production of an arbitrary colorless system. In the case of the Drell-Yan process, we confirm the recent result of Ref. [2]. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.