A consistent factorization theorem is presented in the framework of effective field theories. Conventional factorization suffers from infrared divergences in the soft and collinear parts. We present a factorization theorem in which the infrared divergences appear only in the parton distribution functions by carefully reorganizing collinear and soft parts. The central idea is extracting the soft contributions from the collinear part to avoid double counting. Combining it with the original soft part, an infrared-finite kernel is obtained. This factorization procedure can be applied to various high-energy scattering processes.

• Received 18 December 2012

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.122002