Higgs boson production at the LHC: transverse-momentum resummation and rapidity dependence

TL;DR

This paper develops a detailed resummation framework for predicting the transverse-momentum and rapidity distributions of Higgs bosons produced via gluon fusion at the LHC, improving accuracy in the small q_T region.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic all-order resummation method at NNLL accuracy for Higgs production, incorporating rapidity dependence and matching with fixed-order results.

Findings

Resummation improves predictions at small q_T

Quantitative differential cross sections provided for LHC energies

Enhanced understanding of Higgs kinematic distributions

Abstract

We consider Higgs boson production by gluon fusion in hadron collisions. We study the doubly-differential transverse-momentum (q_T) and rapidity (y) distribution of the Higgs boson in perturbative QCD. In the region of small q_T (q_T << M_H, M_H being the mass of the Higgs boson), we include the effect of logarithmically-enhanced contributions due to multiparton radiation to all perturbative orders. We use the impact parameter and double Mellin moments to implement and factorize the multiparton kinematics constraint of transverse- and longitudinal-momentum conservation. The logarithmic terms are then systematically resummed in exponential form. At small q_T, we perform the all-order resummation of large logarithms up to next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy, while at large q_T (q_T ~ M_H), we apply a matching procedure that recovers the fixed-order perturbation theory up to next-to-leading order. We present quantitative results for the differential cross section in q_T and y at the LHC, and we comment on the comparison with the q_T cross section integrated over y.