Generalised antenna functions for higher-order calculations

A bstract In this paper we discuss the definition, the construction and the implementation of generalised antenna functions for final-state radiation up to Next-to-Next-to-Leading Order (NNLO) in QCD. Generalised antenna functions encapsulate the singular behaviour of unresolved emissions when these occur within multiple hard radiators and not just two of them, as for traditional antenna functions. The construction of such objects is possible thanks to the recently proposed algorithm for building idealised antenna functions from a target set of infrared limits. Generalised antenna functions bring major simplifications in the assemblage of subtraction terms in the context of the antenna scheme at NNLO and beyond, as well as a substantial computational speedup of higher-order calculations. We discuss in detail the improvements on the formal and practical side for the computation of the NNLO correction to three-jet production at electron-positron colliders, providing a thorough numerical validation of the newly proposed scheme. For this calculation one can expect almost an order of magnitude speedup with respect to the original implementation.