Diphoton production at Next-to-Next-to-Leading-Order

TL;DR

This paper presents a detailed NNLO QCD calculation for diphoton production in hadron collisions, crucial for Higgs boson searches and background understanding at the LHC and Tevatron.

Contribution

The authors develop a fully-differential NNLO QCD calculation for diphoton production using the qT subtraction formalism, implemented in a flexible Monte Carlo program.

Findings

NNLO corrections significantly impact diphoton production rates.

The method allows arbitrary kinematic cuts and detailed distribution analysis.

Results are relevant for Higgs to gamma gamma decay channel background estimation.

Abstract

We consider direct diphoton production in hadron collisions. We compute the next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) QCD radiative corrections at the fully-differential level. Our calculation uses the qT subtraction formalism and it is implemented in a parton level Monte Carlo program, which 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 the Tevatron, and we show how the NNLO corrections to diphoton production are relevant to understand the main background of the decay channel H -> \gamma \gamma of the Higgs boson H.