Gluon-induced Higgs-strahlung at next-to-leading order QCD

TL;DR

This paper calculates the next-to-leading order QCD corrections to gluon-induced Higgs-strahlung, showing significant enhancement of the cross section and providing more accurate predictions for Higgs production with a Z-boson.

Contribution

It presents the first NLO QCD calculation of gluon-induced Higgs-strahlung, including the K-factor and its implications for experimental predictions.

Findings

Large correction factors K≈2 for total and boosted Higgs scenarios

Rescaling LO predictions by K-factor yields reliable NLO results

Gluon-induced contributions are significant to the Higgs-Z production cross section

Abstract

Gluon-induced contributions to the associated production of a Higgs and a Z-boson are calculated with NLO accuracy in QCD. They constitute a significant contribution to the cross section for this process. The perturbative correction factor (K-factor) is calculated in the limit of infinite top-quark and vanishing bottom-quark masses. The qualitative similarity of the results to the well-known ones for the gluon-fusion process $gg\to H$ allows to conclude that rescaling the LO prediction by this K-factor leads to a reliable NLO result and realistic error estimate due to missing higher-order perturbative effects. We consider the total inclusive cross section as well as a scenario with a boosted Higgs boson, where the Higgs boson's transverse momentum is restricted to values ptH>200GeV. In both cases, we find large correction factors $K\approx 2$ in most of the parameter space.