Higgs production in gluon fusion at next-to-next-to-leading order QCD for finite top mass

TL;DR

This paper calculates the Higgs production cross section via gluon fusion at NNLO QCD, explicitly including finite top quark mass effects, and confirms the accuracy of the effective theory approximation within 1%.

Contribution

It introduces a method to incorporate finite top mass effects into NNLO QCD calculations for Higgs production, improving precision over previous effective theory approaches.

Findings

The cross section calculation agrees within 1% with the effective theory approach.

The method achieves better than 1% accuracy for the hadronic cross section.

Finite top mass effects are significant at NNLO and are accurately modeled.

Abstract

The inclusive Higgs production cross section from gluon fusion is calculated through NNLO QCD, including its top quark mass dependence. This is achieved through a matching of the 1/mtop expansion of the partonic cross sections to the exact large s-hat limits which are derived from k_T-factorization. The accuracy of this procedure is estimated to be better than 1% for the hadronic cross section. The final result is shown to be within 1% of the commonly used effective theory approach, thus confirming earlier findings.