Electroweak and finite quark-mass effects on the Higgs boson transverse momentum distribution

TL;DR

This paper provides a detailed analysis of the effects of electroweak interactions and finite quark masses on the Higgs boson transverse momentum distribution, crucial for accurate predictions at colliders.

Contribution

It includes exact quark mass dependence and electroweak effects in Higgs production, improving upon previous approximations for collider phenomenology.

Findings

Finite top and bottom quark mass effects decrease the Higgs p_T distribution by up to 8% at Tevatron and 30% at LHC.

Electroweak gauge boson contributions significantly alter the Higgs transverse momentum spectrum.

The combined effects are especially relevant for high-momentum Higgs analyses.

Abstract

We perform a detailed study of the various one-loop contributions leading to production of the Standard Model Higgs boson in association with a hard jet. This production mode contributes to the current Tevatron exclusion limit of the Standard Model Higgs with 160 GeV < M_H < 170 GeV, and will also be important for discovery and interpretation of new scalar bosons at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). We include top- and bottom-quark initiated contributions, maintaining the exact dependence on the quark masses, and also study previously neglected W- and Z-boson mediated effects which shift the qg and q\bar{q} production modes. We consider the deviations from commonly used approximations for the Higgs boson transverse momentum spectrum caused by the finite top-quark mass, bottom quark contributions, and electroweak gauge boson terms. All three effects act to decrease the Higgs boson transverse momentum distribution for observable momenta, with shifts reaching -8% at the Tevatron and -30% at the LHC. The shifts have a significant dependence on the Higgs p_T, and are especially important if large momenta are selected by experimental cuts.