High precision predictions for exclusive $VH$ production at the LHC

TL;DR

This work delivers a high-precision prediction for exclusive VH production in the 0-jet bin at the LHC by combining jet-veto resummation at ${\rm NNLL}'_p$ within SCET with NNLO fixed-order QCD. The authors implement a careful factorization into hard, beam, and soft functions with rapidity evolution, and they match the resummed result to NNLO to form a consistent NNLL'_p+NNLO prediction. In the boosted regime, the approach stabilizes the perturbative expansion and reduces scale uncertainties, enhancing the precision of Higgs property measurements in boosted Higgs analyses. The numerical study, using realistic cuts and jet definitions, demonstrates improved convergence and substantial veto-efficiency, providing a robust framework for experimental analyses and future refinements to jet clustering effects and cuts.

Abstract

We present a resummation-improved prediction for $VH$ + 0 jets production at the Large Hadron Collider. We focus on highly-boosted final states in the presence of jet veto to suppress the $t{\bar t}$ background. In this case, conventional fixed-order calculations are plagued by the existence of large Sudakov logarithms $α_s^n \log^m (p_T^{veto}/Q)$ for $Q\sim m_V + m_H$ which lead to unreliable predictions as well as large theoretical uncertainties, and thus limit the accuracy when comparing experimental measurements to the Standard Model. In this work, we show that the resummation of Sudakov logarithms beyond the next-to-next-to-leading-log accuracy, combined with the next-to-next-to-leading order calculation, reduces the scale uncertainty and stabilizes the perturbative expansion in the region where the vector bosons carry large transverse momentum. Our result improves the precision with which Higgs properties can be determined from LHC measurements using boosted Higgs techniques.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: We compare the NNLO QCD (red solid) cross section with the expanded NNLL to ${\cal O} \left(\alpha_s^2\right)$ from SCET prediction (blue dotted) for both $ZH$ with $p^{T}_{Z} > 100\>{\rm GeV}$ (left panel) and $W^+H$ with $p^{T}_{W}>180\>{\rm GeV}$ production (right panel) at LHC14. We focus on the small values of $p_T^{veto}$.
• Figure 2: The NLO (brown dashed) and NNLO (blue dotted) predictions for $ZH$ production at LHC$14$ (left panel) along with the resummation improved ${\rm NLL}'+{\rm NLO}$ (gray dot-dashed) and ${\rm NNLL}'_p+{\rm NNLO}$ (red solid) results (right panel) are showed, as a comparison of the convergence of the perturbative series with and without the jet veto log resummation.
• Figure 3: Similar plots as fig. \ref{['fig:zcompare']} for the convergence study on $W^+H$ production at LHC$14$. The error bars denote the estimated theoretical scale uncertainties.
• Figure 4: The comparison between the NNLO cross sections with (red solid) and without (blue dotted) the ${\rm NNLL}'_p + \pi^2$ resummation for both $ZH$ (left panel) and $W^+H$ production at LHC$14$. The error bars reflect the scale uncertainties.