ANALYTICAL O(ALPHA) DISTRIBUTIONS FOR BHABHA SCATTERING AT LOW ANGLES

We calculate analytically in QED the O(alpha) corrected total cross section and selected distributions for low angle Bhabha scattering with semi-realistic cuts at LEP/SLC energies. In the angular range from 0.1-degrees to 10-degrees the total analytical cross-section agrees with the Monte Carlo result to within 0.03% and the differential distributions better than 1%. This is the first test of the O(alpha) calculations (Monte Carlo versus analytical) for low angle Bhabha at this precision level. Our calculation provides a solid basis, i.e. a baseline calculation, for future discussion of the O(alpha(2)) corrections, exponentiation and other higher order summation techniques at the overall QED precision tag of 0.2% for this process.