Threshold resummation effects in Higgs boson pair production at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper studies the impact of soft-collinear resummation on Higgs boson pair production at the LHC, showing increased cross section predictions and reduced uncertainties, aiding Higgs self-coupling measurements.

Contribution

It provides the first Next-to-Next-to-Leading-Logarithmic resummation of Higgs pair production including full top quark mass effects, improving theoretical accuracy.

Findings

Resummation increases NLO cross section by 20-30%.

Scale uncertainty is reduced to 8%.

Cross section and distribution shape are sensitive to Higgs self-coupling.

Abstract

We investigate the resummation effects in the Standard Model Higgs boson pair production through gluon-gluon fusion at the LHC with soft-collinear effective theory. We calculate the total cross section and the invariant mass distribution at Next-to-Next-to-Leading-Logarithmic level with $\pi^2$-enhanced terms resummed, which are matched to the QCD Next-to-Leading Order results. In the high order QCD predictions exact top quark mass effects are included in full form factors. Our results show that the resummation effects increase the Next-to-Leading Order results by about $20% \sim 30%$, and the scale uncertainty is reduced to 8%, which lead to increased confidence on the theoretical predictions. The PDF+$\as$ uncertainties are almost not changed after including resummation effects. We also study the sensitivities of the total cross section and the invariant mass distribution to the Higgs boson self-coupling. We find that the total cross section and the invariant mass distribution shape depend strongly on the Higgs boson self-coupling, and therefore it is possible to extract Higgs boson self-coupling from the total cross section and invariant mass distribution when the measurement precision increases at the LHC.