Beyond Heavy Top Limit In Higgs Boson Production At LHC

TL;DR

This paper evaluates QCD corrections to Higgs boson production at the LHC, demonstrating that top mass effects are minimal and supporting the continued use of the heavy top approximation in theoretical predictions.

Contribution

It provides the first asymptotic expansion near the heavy top limit, including top mass-suppressed terms, to assess their impact on cross section calculations.

Findings

Top mass-suppressed terms are small compared to scale uncertainties.

Heavy top approximation remains valid for Higgs production calculations.

QCD corrections at NNLO are consistent with previous estimates.

Abstract

QCD corrections to inclusive Higgs boson production at the LHC are evaluated at next-to-next-to leading order. By performing asymptotic expansion of the cross section near the limit of infinitely heavy top quark we obtained a few first top mass-suppressed terms. The corrections to the hadronic cross sections are found to be small compared to the scale uncertainty, thus justifying the use of heavy top quark approximation in many published results.