Soft-drop event shapes in electron–positron annihilation at next-to-next-to-leading order accuracy

Abstract We present predictions for soft-drop event shapes of hadronic final states in electron–positron annihilation at next-to-next-to-leading order accuracy in perturbation theory obtained using the CoLoRFulNNLO subtraction method. We study the impact of the soft drop on the convergence of the perturbative expansion for the distributions of three event shape variables, the soft-drop thrust, the hemisphere jet and narrow jet invariant masses. We find that grooming generally improves perturbative convergence for these event shapes. This better perturbative stability, in conjunction with a reduced sensitivity to non-perturbative hadronization corrections makes soft-drop event shapes promising observables for the precise determination of the strong coupling at lepton colliders.