Electroweak corrections to Higgs-strahlung off W/Z bosons at the Tevatron and the LHC with HAWK

TL;DR

This paper refines calculations of electroweak corrections for Higgs-strahlung processes at Tevatron and LHC, including leptonic decays, and implements these in the HAWK Monte Carlo program for improved differential predictions.

Contribution

It introduces a fully differential calculation of electroweak corrections for Higgs-strahlung with leptonic decays, enhancing previous models and integrating into HAWK for practical use.

Findings

Electroweak corrections are about -5% to -10% for total cross sections.

Corrections increase with transverse momentum, reaching -14% for p_T,H > 200 GeV.

Corrections are significant for high-p_T Higgs boson production at the LHC.

Abstract

The associate production of Higgs bosons with W or Z bosons, known as Higgs-strahlung, is an important search channel for Higgs bosons at the hadron colliders Tevatron and LHC for low Higgs-boson masses. We refine a previous calculation of next-to-leading-order electroweak corrections (and recalculate the QCD corrections) upon including the leptonic decay of the W/Z bosons, thereby keeping the fully differential information of the 2-lepton + Higgs final state. The gauge invariance of the W/Z-resonance treatment is ensured by the use of the complex-mass scheme. The electroweak corrections, which are at the level of -(5-10)% for total cross sections, further increase in size with increasing transverse momenta p_T in differential cross sections. For instance, for p_T,H >~ 200GeV, which is the interesting range at the LHC, the electroweak corrections to WH production reach about -14% for M_H = 120GeV. The described corrections are implemented in the HAWK Monte Carlo program, which was initially designed for the vector-boson-fusion channel, and are discussed for various distributions in the production channels pp / p \bar p -> H + l nu_l / l^-l^+ / nu_l \bar nu_l + X.