NNLO corrections to the total cross section for Higgs boson production in hadron-hadron collisions
V. Ravindran, J. Smith, W. L. van Neerven
TL;DR
This work delivers NNLO QCD corrections to the total cross section for (pseudo-)scalar Higgs production in hadron collisions using the heavy-top effective Lagrangian. The calculation includes all partonic subprocesses and employs a complete NNLO treatment of the coefficient functions within a renormalization- and factorization-consistent framework, with results expressed in terms of Delta functions and convolutions with splitting functions. The analysis demonstrates that gg fusion dominates the total cross section, explores scale and PDF dependencies, and assesses the soft-plus-virtual contributions and their impact on higher-order uncertainties. The NNLO predictions show improved perturbative stability and provide guidance for precision Higgs phenomenology at the LHC and Tevatron, including implications for resummation of threshold-enhanced corrections.
Abstract
We present the next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) corrections to the total cross section for (pseudo-) scalar Higgs boson production using an alternative method than those used in previous calculations. All QCD partonic subprocesses have been included and the computation is carried out in the effective Lagrangian approach which emerges from the standard model by taking the limit $m_t \to \infty$ where $m_t$ denotes the mass of the top quark. Our results agree with those published earlier in the literature. We estimate the theoretical uncertainties by comparing the $K$-factors and the variation with respect to the mass factorization/renormalization scales with the results obtained by lower order calculations. We also investigate the dependence of the cross section on several parton density sets provided by different groups. Further we study which part of the coefficient functions dominates the cross section. This is of interest for the resummation of large corrections which occur near the boundary of phase space. It turns out that depending on the definition of the total cross section the latter is dominated by the the soft-plus-virtual gluon corrections represented by $δ(1-x)$ and $(\ln^i(1-x)/(1-x))_+$ terms. PACS numbers: 12.38.-t, 12.38.Bx, 13.85.-t, 14.80.Gt.