Soft Gluon Effects on Electroweak Boson Production in Hadron Collisions

Shortened table of contents: 1. Introduction 1.1 The Standard Model of Elementary Particles 1.2 The Quantum Nature of Gauge Fields 2. Soft Gluon Resummation 2.1 Lepton Pair Production at Fixed Order in $\alpha _s$ 2.2 The Resummation Formalism 3. Vector Boson Production and Decay in Hadron Collisions 3.1 Vector Boson Distributions 3.2 Lepton Distributions 4. Photon Pair Production In Hadronic Interactions 4.1 Diphoton Production at Fixed Order 4.2 Extension of the Resummation Formalism 5. Gauge Boson Pair Production at the Upgraded Tevatron and at the LHC 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Analytical Results 6. Charged Scalar Production at Hadron Colliders 6.1 Introduction 6.2 Charged (Pseudo-)Scalar Production via Charm-Bottom Fusion 6.3 Soft Gluon Resummation 6.4 Hadronic Decays of Charged (Pseudo-)Scalars to $O(\alpha _s)$ 6.5 Neutral (Pseudo-)Scalar Production via $b \bar b$ Fusion A. Probing Higgs Bosons with Large Bottom Yukawa Coupling at Hadron Colliders B. ``Intrinsic $k_T$'' and Soft Gluon Resummation