N-Jettiness soft functions made simple

A bstract We present a new method to compute the soft function for the N -Jettiness variable for arbitrary N at high perturbative orders in QCD. It is based on the observation that the most singular part of the soft function, the dipole contribution, can be represented by a sum of an analytically calculable inclusive soft function and a remainder. The latter is absent at NLO, is immediately finite at NNLO, and we expect that can be made finite with the help of simple NLO-like infrared subtractions at N 3 LO. As a byproduct of this approach, we derive a very simple formula for the tripole contribution to the N -Jettiness NNLO soft function, which results in a fast numerical evaluation. We apply this method to compute the N -Jettiness soft function at NNLO, and report numerical results for up to five jets for the hadron-collider soft function. We finally outline the prospects for applications at N 3 LO.