Soft gluons in Higgs plus two jet production

TL;DR

Problem: soft-gluon radiation effects in Higgs production with two jets under a central jet veto must be modeled accurately. Approach: perform all-order resummation of leading soft-gluon logarithms using a color-space evolution matrix Γ in a singlet–octet basis for both WBF and ggF, including Coulomb gluon effects and noting the (small) role of non-global logs; results can be adapted via a shift in the evolution variable to account for higher-loop corrections. Findings: gluon-fusion channels experience stronger soft radiation suppression than WBF, with the effect increasing with the evolution variable ξ, while interference between the channels remains negligible. Significance: provides a practical framework for improving jet-veto predictions in Higgs+2 jet production at the LHC and helps experimental separation of Higgs production mechanisms, highlighting when resummation is essential beyond fixed-order calculations.

Abstract

We investigate the effects of an all order QCD resummation of soft gluon emissions for Higgs boson production in association with two hard jets. We consider both the gluon-gluon fusion and weak boson fusion processes and show how to resum a large part of the leading logarithms in the jet veto scale. Our resummation improves on previous analyses which also aim to include the effects of multiple soft gluon radiation. In addition we calculate the interference between weak boson fusion and gluon-gluon fusion and find that it is small.