Theoretical Status of Higgs Production at Hadron Colliders in the SM

TL;DR

The paper surveys the theoretical status of SM Higgs production and decay at hadron colliders, focusing on the Tevatron and LHC. It reviews the dominant gluon-fusion mechanism and the complementary modes—vector boson fusion, Higgs strahlung, and ttH—alongside decays whose branching fractions depend on the Higgs mass. It compiles the state-of-the-art higher-order QCD and electroweak corrections, updated parton distribution functions, and background calculations, highlighting how these refinements shape cross sections, kinematic distributions, and search strategies. Overall, the work underscores the readiness of precise theory to guide Higgs searches, exclusions, and coupling measurements at the LHC, while acknowledging ongoing refinements for both signal and background processes.

Abstract

We briefly review the current status of theoretical calculations for Higgs production at hadron colliders within the Standard Model. We focus on the main production mechanisms and decay modes at the Tevatron and the LHC.

Figures (6)

• Figure 1: Total cross sections for Higgs production at the LHC (upper picture) and branching ratios for a Standard Model Higgs boson Duperrin:2008in(lower picture).
• Figure 2: Example two-loop light-quark diagram contributing to the Higgs boson production cross section via gluon fusion.
• Figure 3: Example three-loop light-quark diagrams contributing to the $\mathcal{O}(\alpha\alpha_s)$ term.
• Figure 4: The Tevatron exclusion limits of a SM Higgs boson mass in the range $160-170$ GeV at $95\%$ CL :2009pt.
• Figure 5: a) Pseudorapidity distribution of the two tagging jets in signal events with $m_H = 160$ GeV and for $t\bar{t}$ background events. b) Rapidity separation between the tagging jets Asai:2004ws.