Reducing theoretical uncertainties for exclusive Higgs plus one-jet production at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper improves the precision of theoretical predictions for Higgs plus one-jet production at the LHC by calculating the full one-loop soft function and matching resummation with NLO results, reducing uncertainties.

Contribution

It extends previous resummation calculations by including the full one-loop soft function and matching to NLO, enhancing accuracy for Higgs plus one-jet predictions at the LHC.

Findings

Matched NLL'+ NLO cross section has smaller uncertainties.

Resummation reduces theoretical errors in Higgs analyses.

Numerical results support improved precision for LHC Higgs studies.

Abstract

We resum a class of large Sudakov logarithms affecting Higgs boson production in the exclusive one-jet bin at the LHC. We extend previous results by calculating the full one-loop soft function for this process, which extends the accuracy of the resummation to include the leading three logarithmic corrections at each order in the QCD coupling constant. We match this result to the next-to-leading order cross section and present a detailed numerical study assuming realistic LHC cuts. Careful attention is paid to the matching procedure, and to the theoretical uncertainties induced by residual scale variation. We find that the matched NLL'+ NLO cross section has significantly smaller uncertainties than the fixed-order result, and can be used to alleviate the theoretical errors hindering current Higgs analyses at the LHC.