Variable Flavor Number Parton Distributions and Weak Gauge and Higgs Boson Production at Hadron Colliders at NNLO of QCD

TL;DR

This paper presents NNLO predictions for gauge boson and Higgs boson production at hadron colliders using variable flavor number parton distributions, showing increased accuracy and size of cross sections compared to NLO.

Contribution

It introduces NNLO calculations within the variable flavor number scheme for heavy quark partons, enabling more precise collider predictions.

Findings

NNLO gauge boson production rates are larger than NLO by over 1 sigma.

Higgs production cross sections at NNLO are about 20% higher than NLO.

Predictions achieve about 5% accuracy at LHC energies.

Abstract

Based on our recent NNLO dynamical parton distributions as obtained in the `fixed flavor number scheme', we generate radiatively parton distributions in the `variable flavor number scheme' where also the heavy quark flavors (c,b,t) become massless partons within the nucleon. Only within this latter factorization scheme NNLO calculations are feasible at present, since the required partonic subprocesses are only available in the approximation of massless initial-state partons. The NNLO predictions for gauge boson production are typically larger (by more than 1 sigma) than the NLO ones, and rates at LHC energies can be predicted with an accuracy of about 5%, whereas at Tevatron they are more than 2 sigma above the NLO ones. The NNLO predictions for SM Higgs boson production via the dominant gluon fusion process have a total (pdf and scale) uncertainty of about 10% at LHC which almost doubles at the lower Tevatron energies; they are typically about 20% larger than the ones at NLO but the total uncertainty bands overlap.