Resummation of angular dependent corrections in spontaneously broken gauge theories

Recent investigations of electroweak radiative corrections have revealed the importance of higher order contributions in high energy processes, where the size of typical corrections can exceed those associated with QCD considerably. Beyond one loop, only universal (angular independent) corrections are known to all orders except for massless processes, where also angle dependent corrections exist in the literature. In this paper we present general arguments for the consistent resummation of angle dependent subleading (SL) logarithmic corrections to all orders in the regime where all invariants are still large compared to the gauge boson masses. We discuss soft isospin correlations, fermion mass and gauge boson mass gap effects, the longitudinal and Higgs boson sector as well as mixing contributions including CKM effects for massive quarks. Two loop results for the right handed Standard Model are generalized in the context of the high energy effective theory based on the standard model Lagrangian in the symmetric basis with the appropriate matching conditions to include the soft QED regime. The result is expressed in exponentiated operator form in a CKM extended isospin space in the symmetric basis. Thus, a full electroweak SL treatment based on the infrared evolution equation method is formulated for arbitrary high energy processes at future colliders. Comparisons with known results are presented. Received: 12 February 2002 / Revised version: 7 March 2002 / Published online: 8 May 2002