Higgs production in hadron collisions: soft and virtual QCD corrections at NNLO

TL;DR

This work addresses precise QCD predictions for SM Higgs production via gluon-gluon fusion by computing soft and virtual NNLO corrections in the large-$M_t$ limit and integrating them with soft-gluon resummation up to NNLL accuracy. The authors derive the SV and collinear-improved (SVC) approximations, verify consistency with resummation formalisms, and extract NNLL coefficients, enabling improved estimates of hadronic cross sections. Numerical results for the LHC using MRST2000 NNLO PDFs indicate reduced scale uncertainties and an NNLO enhancement of the NLO cross section for a light Higgs by about 15–25%. This framework provides a viable near-term proxy for full NNLO calculations and informs Higgs phenomenology and future extensions to MSSM scenarios.

Abstract

We consider QCD corrections to Higgs boson production through gluon-gluon fusion in hadron collisions. Using the recently evaluated two-loop amplitude for this process and the corresponding factorization formulae for soft-gluon bremsstrahlung at O(alpha_s^2), we compute the soft and virtual contributions to the NNLO cross section. We also discuss soft-gluon resummation at next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy. Numerical results for Higgs boson production at the LHC are presented.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: Scale dependence of the Higgs production cross section for $M_H=115$ GeV at LO, NLO, NNLO-SV and NNLO-SVC.
• Figure 2: K-factors for Higgs production for the full NLO result and the NLO-SV, NLO-SVC, NNLO-SV and NNLO-SVC approximations.
• Figure 3: Cross section for Higgs boson production at the LHC in the NNLO-SV and NNLO-SVC approximations.
• Figure 4: Cross section for Higgs production with $M_H=115$ GeV computed using different NLO and NNLO parton distributions and coupling constant.