NNLO results for heavy quark and direct photon production near threshold

Heavy quark and direct photon production in hadronic collisions are processes of great interest. The discovery of the top has increased efforts in the calculation of heavy quark production cross sections while direct photon production is important for determinations of gluon distributions. Near threshold for the production of the final state in these processes one can resum logarithmic corrections originating from soft gluon emission. A formalism and methods for the resummation of soft-gluon contributions at next-to-leading logarithmic (NLL) accuracy for a variety of QCD hard scattering processes, including heavy quark, jet, and direct photon production, have been recently developed (for a review see Ref. [1]). The resummed cross sections have been expanded at next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) and exhibit a substantially reduced scale dependence relative to next-to-leading order (NLO).