Phenomenological analysis of Higgs boson production through gluon fusion in association with jets

TL;DR

<3-5 sentence high-level summary> The paper delivers a comprehensive NLO QCD study of Higgs boson production in gluon fusion in association with up to three jets, using an effective Higgs-gluon coupling in the large top-mass limit and automated GoSam-Sherpa tooling. It analyzes both inclusive and VBF-like fiducial regions at 8 and 13 TeV, demonstrating sizeable NLO corrections across jet multiplicities and highlighting the substantial impact of the third jet on background estimates for VBF. The work also investigates tagging-jet definitions and high-energy behavior, showing how H+3 jets at NLO informs exclusive H+2 jets predictions and the robustness of various observables under different scales. Public Ntuples and detailed differential results support improved background modeling for Higgs measurements and VBF searches, with future directions including merging across jet multiplicities and incorporating finite top-mass effects and shower matching.

Abstract

We present a detailed phenomenological analysis of the production of a Standard Model Higgs boson in association with up to three jets. We consider the gluon fusion channel using an effective theory in the large top-quark mass limit. Higgs boson production in gluon fusion constitutes an irreducible background to the vector boson fusion (VBF) process; hence the precise knowledge of its characteristics is a prerequisite for any measurement in the VBF channel. The calculation is carried out at next-to-leading order (NLO) in QCD in a fully automated way by combining the two programs GoSam and Sherpa. We present numerical results for a large variety of observables for both standard cuts and VBF selection cuts. We find that for all jet multiplicities the NLO corrections are sizeable. This is particularly true in the presence of kinematic selections enhancing the VBF topology, which are based on vetoing additional jet activity. In this case, precise predictions for the background can be made using our calculation by taking the difference between the inclusive H+2 jets and the inclusive H+3 jets result.

Figures (30)

• Figure 1: Total cross sections for $\mathrm{H}$ + 1 jet (green), $\mathrm{H}$ + 2 jets (blue) and $\mathrm{H}$ + 3 jets (red) for LO and NLO. In the lower part of the plot the ratios $r_{2/1}$ (blue), $r_{3/2}$ (red) and $r_{4/3}$ (orange) are shown. On the left plot the results have been obtained for 8 $\mathrm{TeV}$, the right plot is for 13 $\mathrm{TeV}$.
• Figure 2: Total cross section as a function of the jet radius $R$ normalized to the $R=0.4$ result. The left plots shows the results for 8 $\mathrm{TeV}$, the right plot shows the 13 $\mathrm{TeV}$ result.
• Figure 3: Scale dependence of the total cross section for scale choices A, B and C for different PDF sets with a center of mass energy of 8 $\mathrm{TeV}$ (upper row) and 13 $\mathrm{TeV}$ (lower row), and for $\mathrm{H}$ + 2 jets (left column) and $\mathrm{H}$ + 3 jets (right column).
• Figure 4: Exclusive jet cross sections for $\mathrm{H}$ + $n$ jets $(n=1,2,3$) for 8 $\mathrm{TeV}$ (left) and 13 $\mathrm{TeV}$ (right). For each of the three processes two bins are plotted. The first contains its exclusive NLO contribution, the second the contribution to the n+1 process, i.e. the real emission with LO accuracy. The darker shaded areas denote the uncertainty from scale variation.
• Figure 5: The transverse momentum distribution of the combined Higgs boson plus associated leading dijet system (\ref{['sfig:higgs12pT']}), and the distribution of their relative azimuthal angle, $\Delta\phi_{\,\mathrm{H}\xspace,\,j_1j_2}$, (\ref{['sfig:higgs12dphi']}) at both LHC center-of-mass energies of 13 $\mathrm{TeV}$ as well as 8 $\mathrm{TeV}$.