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Higgs Boson Production at Hadron Colliders

William B. Kilgore

TL;DR

Problem: obtaining a reliable NNLO QCD prediction for inclusive Higgs production via gluon fusion at hadron colliders. Approach: compute NNLO corrections in the $m_t\to\infty$ effective theory, expand the double-real emission near threshold, and invert the threshold-series to recover the exact hadronic cross section, with a basis-function mapping inspired by Drell–Yan results. Findings: the threshold expansion converges rapidly; the inverted-series result agrees exactly with independent NNLO calculations, and hadronic cross sections folded with approximate NNLO PDFs show tiny differences from prior truncations within scale uncertainty. Significance: this provides a robust, analytic, and cross-validated NNLO prediction for Higgs production and extends to preliminary pseudo-scalar results, enhancing precision for collider phenomenology.

Abstract

I report on a calculation of the inclusive Higgs boson production cross section at hadron colliders at next-to-next-to-leading order in QCD. The result is computed as an expansion about the threshold region. By continuing the expansion to very high order, we map the result onto basis functions and obtain the result in closed analytic form.

Higgs Boson Production at Hadron Colliders

TL;DR

Problem: obtaining a reliable NNLO QCD prediction for inclusive Higgs production via gluon fusion at hadron colliders. Approach: compute NNLO corrections in the effective theory, expand the double-real emission near threshold, and invert the threshold-series to recover the exact hadronic cross section, with a basis-function mapping inspired by Drell–Yan results. Findings: the threshold expansion converges rapidly; the inverted-series result agrees exactly with independent NNLO calculations, and hadronic cross sections folded with approximate NNLO PDFs show tiny differences from prior truncations within scale uncertainty. Significance: this provides a robust, analytic, and cross-validated NNLO prediction for Higgs production and extends to preliminary pseudo-scalar results, enhancing precision for collider phenomenology.

Abstract

I report on a calculation of the inclusive Higgs boson production cross section at hadron colliders at next-to-next-to-leading order in QCD. The result is computed as an expansion about the threshold region. By continuing the expansion to very high order, we map the result onto basis functions and obtain the result in closed analytic form.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 4 sections, 3 equations, 2 figures, 1 table.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. The Calculation
  3. Inverting the series
  4. Hadronic Results

Figures (2)

  • Figure 1: NNLO cross section for Higgs production using the exact partonic cross section and series expansions truncated at the indicated values.
  • Figure 2: Cross section for pseudo-scalar Higgs production at leading order (LO), NLO and NNLO (preliminary) Harlander:2002vv. The model dependent couling $g_t$ has been set to unity.