Direct Higgs production and jet veto at the Tevatron and the LHC in NNLO QCD

TL;DR

The paper computes direct Higgs production cross sections at hadron colliders via gluon-gluon fusion up to NNLO QCD, using soft-virtual and soft-virtual-collinear approximations in the large-M_top limit. It also analyzes the impact of a jet veto on the cross section, deriving NLO and NNLO vetoed results by subtracting Higgs+jets contributions. The NNLO SV/SVC corrections significantly raise the inclusive cross section at the Tevatron and reduce with a jet veto, while the effect is milder at the LHC but vetoes become more effective there. The results demonstrate improved perturbative stability with higher-order corrections and jet vetoes, while also highlighting potential logarithmic enhancements for small pT vetoes that may require resummation and careful experimental treatment.

Abstract

We consider Higgs boson production through gluon--gluon fusion in hadron collisions, when a veto is applied on the transverse momenta of the accompanying hard jets. We compute the QCD radiative corrections to this process at NLO and NNLO. The NLO calculation is complete. The NNLO calculation uses the recently evaluated NNLO soft and virtual QCD contributions to the inclusive cross section. We find that the jet veto reduces the impact of the NLO and NNLO contributions, the reduction being more sizeable at the LHC than at the Tevatron.

Figures (12)

• Figure 1: Parton ($gg$ and $qg+g\bar{q}$) luminosities ${\cal L}(\tau,\mu_F^2)$ with $\mu_F=M_H=150$ GeV at the Tevatron Run II as a function of the partonic centre-of-mass energy $\sqrt{{\hat{s}}}$$({\hat{s}}= \tau s)$. We use the LO set of parton distributions in Ref. mrst2000.
• Figure 2: Relative difference of LO and NLO results computed with GRV98 and CTEQ5 distributions with respect to MRST2000 distribution.
• Figure 3: Scale dependence of the Higgs production cross section for $M_H=150$ GeV at LO, NLO, NNLO-SV and NNLO-SVC.
• Figure 4: $K$-factors for Higgs production for the full NLO result and the NLO-SV, NLO-SVC, NNLO-SV and NNLO-SVC approximations.
• Figure 5: Vetoed cross section and $K$-factors: NLO results at the Tevatron Run II.