Diphoton production at hadron colliders: a fully-differential QCD calculation at NNLO

TL;DR

This paper presents a fully-differential NNLO QCD calculation for diphoton production at hadron colliders, enabling precise predictions for Higgs searches and other analyses.

Contribution

It introduces a novel NNLO QCD computation framework using the $q_T$ subtraction formalism with a flexible Monte Carlo implementation.

Findings

Provides accurate diphoton production cross sections at NNLO

Enables application of arbitrary kinematic cuts in simulations

Offers results relevant for Higgs boson searches at LHC and Tevatron

Abstract

We consider direct diphoton production in hadron collisions, and we compute the next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) QCD radiative corrections at the fully-differential level. Our calculation uses the $q_T$ subtraction formalism and it is implemented in a parton level Monte Carlo program. The program allows the user to apply arbitrary kinematical cuts on the final-state photons and the associated jet activity, and to compute the corresponding distributions in the form of bin histograms. We present selected numerical results related to Higgs boson searches at the LHC and corresponding results at the Tevatron.