Higgs-Boson Production at Small Transverse Momentum

TL;DR

This paper develops a new effective field theory framework to accurately calculate Higgs boson production cross sections at small transverse momentum, incorporating resummation of large logarithms and analyzing non-perturbative effects.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic effective field theory approach for small q_T Higgs production, including the resummation of large logarithms and the impact of the collinear anomaly.

Findings

The transverse-momentum spectrum is insensitive to hadronic effects.

A non-perturbative scale q_* ~ 8 GeV is dynamically generated.

The formalism provides detailed numerical predictions for Higgs production.

Abstract

Using methods from effective field theory, we have recently developed a novel, systematic framework for the calculation of the cross sections for electroweak gauge-boson production at small and very small transverse momentum q_T, in which large logarithms of the scale ratio m_V/q_T are resummed to all orders. This formalism is applied to the production of Higgs bosons in gluon fusion at the LHC. The production cross section receives logarithmically enhanced corrections from two sources: the running of the hard matching coefficient and the collinear factorization anomaly. The anomaly leads to the dynamical generation of a non-perturbative scale q_* ~ m_H e^{-const/\alpha_s(m_H)} ~ 8 GeV, which protects the process from receiving large long-distance hadronic contributions. We present detailed numerical predictions for the transverse-momentum spectrum of the Higgs boson, finding that it is quite insensitive to hadronic effects.