Soft Gluon Radiation in Higgs Boson Production at the LHC
Michael Krämer, Eric Laenen, Michael Spira
TL;DR
The paper addresses the precision of Higgs production predictions at the LHC by focusing on soft gluon radiation, which dominates NLO corrections in both the SM and MSSM. It extends the soft-gluon resummation formalism to include a universal class of contributions and performs all-orders resummation, showing these terms are essential for reproducing the exact NLO result within a few percent. Using the resummed cross section, the authors derive NNLO estimates and analyze scale dependence, and they also demonstrate the relevance of the novel contributions in the resummed Drell-Yan process. The work enhances theoretical accuracy for Higgs cross sections and informs both SM and MSSM phenomenology at high-energy colliders.
Abstract
We examine the contributions of soft gluons to the Higgs production cross section at the LHC in the Standard Model and its minimal supersymmetric extension. The soft gluon radiation effects of this reaction share many features with the Drell-Yan process, but arise at lowest order from a purely gluonic initial state. We provide an extension of the conventional soft gluon resummation formalism to include a new class of contributions which we argue to be universal, and resum these and the usual Sudakov effects to all orders. The effect of these new terms is striking: only if they are included, does the expansion of the resummed cross section to next-to-leading order reproduce the exact result to within a few percent for the full range of Higgs boson masses. We use our resummed cross section to derive next-to-next-to-leading order results, and their scale dependence. Moreover, we demonstrate the importance of including the novel contributions in the resummed Drell-Yan process.