Top Mass Effects in Higgs Production at Hadron Colliders

TL;DR

This paper develops a series expansion to accurately estimate the Higgs production cross-section at hadron colliders, accounting for finite top quark mass effects up to NNLO, with implications for LHC and Tevatron analyses.

Contribution

It introduces the first four-term expansion in mH^2/mtop^2 for Higgs production cross-section, demonstrating convergence at NLO and providing insights at NNLO where exact results are unavailable.

Findings

Series converges well at NLO with exact top mass dependence.

Provides quantitative estimates of finite top mass effects at NNLO.

Numerical results applicable to LHC and Tevatron energies.

Abstract

We derive the first four terms of an expansion in mH^2/mtop^2 of the total Higgs cross-section through gluon fusion. At NLO we demonstrate the excellent convergence of this series to the known result keeping the exact top mass dependence. At NNLO there is no known exact result, and our work represents a thorough quantitative investigation of the effects of finite top mass at this order. We discuss the applicability of our approach, and present numerical results for the LHC and Tevatron.