Soft-gluon resummation and NNLO corrections for direct photon production

The resummation of threshold logarithms for direct photon production cross sections in hadronic collisions is presented. The resummation is based on the factorization properties of the cross section and is formulated at next-to-leading logarithmic or higher accuracy. Full analytical and numerical results for the next-to-next-to-leading order expansion of the resummed cross section are given. A substantial reduction of factorization scale dependence is observed. A comparison to experimental results from the E-706 and UA-6 experiments is presented.