QCD corrections to associated Higgs boson production with a W boson pair at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper calculates the complete NLO QCD corrections to Higgs production with W-boson pairs at the LHC, highlighting the importance of gluon-gluon fusion contributions for accurate cross section predictions.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive analysis of NLO QCD corrections including gluon-gluon fusion for this process, improving theoretical precision for experimental studies.

Findings

QCD NLO corrections significantly increase the cross section (K-factor 1.48 to 1.64).

Gluon-gluon fusion subprocess has a substantial impact on the distributions.

Scale dependence is underestimated at LO, corrected by NLO calculations.

Abstract

The Higgs boson production in association with a pair of W-bosons at the Large Hadron Collider(LHC) can be used to probe the coupling between Higgs boson and vector gauge bosons and discover the signature of new physics. We describe the impact of the complete QCD NLO radiative corrections and the gluon-gluon fusion subprocesss to the cross section of this process at the LHC, and investigate the dependence of the leading order(LO) and the QCD corrected cross sections on the fctorization/renormalization energy scale and Higgs boson mass. We present the LO and QCD corrected distributions of the invariant mass of W-boson pair and the transverse momenta of final W and Higgs boson. We find that the QCD NLO corrections and the contribution from gluon-gluon fusion subprocess significantly modify the LO distributions, and the scale dependence of the QCD corrected cross section is badly underestimated by the LO results. Our numerical results show that the K-factor of the QCD correction varies from 1.48 to 1.64 when $m_H$ goes up from $100 GeV$ to $160 GeV$. We find also the QCD correction from \gghww subprocess at the LHC is significant, and should be considered in precise experiment.