Renormalization-Group Improved Prediction for Higgs Production at Hadron Colliders

TL;DR

This paper employs renormalization-group methods within effective field theory to enhance the accuracy of Higgs boson production cross section predictions at hadron colliders, incorporating advanced resummation techniques and matching to fixed-order calculations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel resummation approach for Higgs production that includes time-like gluon form factor contributions, improving theoretical predictions beyond previous methods.

Findings

Resummation effects increase predicted cross sections by about 13% at the Tevatron and 8% at the LHC for m_H=120 GeV.

The improved predictions align better with experimental data and are significant even at NNLO accuracy.

The technique can be extended to other time-like processes like Drell-Yan and Higgs decays.

Abstract

We use renormalization-group methods in effective field theory to improve the theoretical prediction for the cross section for Higgs-boson production at hadron colliders. In addition to soft-gluon resummation at NNNLL, we also resum enhanced contributions of the form (C_A\pi\alpha_s)^n, which arise in the analytic continuation of the gluon form factor to time-like momentum transfer. This resummation is achieved by evaluating the matching corrections arising at the Higgs-boson mass scale at a time-like renormalization point \mu^2<0, followed by renormalization-group evolution to \mu^2>0. We match our resummed result to NNLO fixed-order perturbation theory and give numerical predictions for the total production cross section as a function of the Higgs-boson mass. Resummation effects are significant even at NNLO, where our improved predictions for the cross sections at the Tevatron and the LHC exceed the fixed-order predictions by about 13% and 8%, respectively, for m_H=120 GeV. We also discuss the application of our technique to other time-like processes such as Drell-Yan production, e^+ e^- --> hadrons, and hadronic decays of the Higgs boson.