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Two-loop electroweak corrections to Higgs production in proton-proton collisions

U. Aglietti, R. Bonciani, G. Degrassi, A. Vicini

TL;DR

This work evaluates the impact of two-loop electroweak corrections on Higgs production via gluon fusion in proton-proton collisions at the LHC. It employs a factorization framework that multiplies the NNLO-QCD hadronic cross section by a delta_EW correction, combining light-fermion EW contributions with the top-quark piece where applicable. The results show a 4–8% increase in the hadronic cross section for m_H ≤ 160 GeV, a size comparable to NNLO-QCD uncertainties, highlighting the importance of including EW effects for precision predictions. The authors provide a practical polynomial form for delta_EW(m_H) and note that PDFs remain the dominant source of theoretical uncertainty.

Abstract

We study the impact of the two-loop electroweak corrections on the production of a Higgs boson via gluon-fusion in proton-proton collisions at LHC energies. We discuss the prescritpion to include the corrections to the hard scattering matrix element in the calculation of the hadronic cross-section sigma (p+p\to H+X). Under the hypothesis of factorization of the electroweak corrections with respect to the dominant soft and collinear QCD radiation, we observe an increase of the total cross-section from 4 to 8 %, for MH <=160 GeV. This increase is comparable with the present QCD uncertainties originating from hard scattering matrix elements.

Two-loop electroweak corrections to Higgs production in proton-proton collisions

TL;DR

This work evaluates the impact of two-loop electroweak corrections on Higgs production via gluon fusion in proton-proton collisions at the LHC. It employs a factorization framework that multiplies the NNLO-QCD hadronic cross section by a delta_EW correction, combining light-fermion EW contributions with the top-quark piece where applicable. The results show a 4–8% increase in the hadronic cross section for m_H ≤ 160 GeV, a size comparable to NNLO-QCD uncertainties, highlighting the importance of including EW effects for precision predictions. The authors provide a practical polynomial form for delta_EW(m_H) and note that PDFs remain the dominant source of theoretical uncertainty.

Abstract

We study the impact of the two-loop electroweak corrections on the production of a Higgs boson via gluon-fusion in proton-proton collisions at LHC energies. We discuss the prescritpion to include the corrections to the hard scattering matrix element in the calculation of the hadronic cross-section sigma (p+p\to H+X). Under the hypothesis of factorization of the electroweak corrections with respect to the dominant soft and collinear QCD radiation, we observe an increase of the total cross-section from 4 to 8 %, for MH <=160 GeV. This increase is comparable with the present QCD uncertainties originating from hard scattering matrix elements.

Paper Structure

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

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Inclusion of the Two-Loop Electroweak Corrections
  3. Numerical Results
  4. Conclusions

Figures (2)

  • Figure 1: Lowest order (a) and generic NLO-EW (b), (c), (d) Feynman diagrams. The solid lines are fermions. The wavy lines are gauge bosons $(V=W,Z)$.
  • Figure 2: The cross section $\sigma_{p+p \to H+X}$, in pb, is plotted as a function of the mass of the Higgs boson, between 114 GeV and 300 GeV. The dotted lines describe the band of NNLO-QCD uncertainty, for three values of the QCD factorization/renormalization scale $\mu=m_{ H}/2,m_H,2m_{ H}$. The solid line is the NNLO-QCD $(\mu=m_{ H})$ with the two-loop EW corrections, according to Eq. (\ref{['sigmafull']}). The two-loop EW corrections include also the top-quark effect, for $m_{ H}\leq 155$GeV, but only the light quarks contribution for larger values of $m_{ H}$.