Parton-shower effects on Higgs boson production via vector-boson fusion in association with three jets

TL;DR

This paper implements a detailed simulation of Higgs boson production via vector-boson fusion with three jets, enabling precise modeling of additional jet activity crucial for background suppression at the LHC.

Contribution

It introduces a new implementation within POWHEG-BOX for VBF Higgs production with three jets, improving the understanding of parton-shower effects on extra jet distributions.

Findings

Parton-shower uncertainties are mild for the third jet distributions.

The implementation aids in better background suppression techniques.

Provides a more accurate description of jet activity in VBF Higgs processes.

Abstract

We present an implementation of Higgs boson production via vector-boson fusion in association with three jets at hadron colliders in the POWHEG-BOX, a framework for the matching of NLO-QCD calculations with parton-shower programs. Our work provides the means to precisely describe the properties of extra jet activity in vector-boson fusion reactions that are used for the suppression of QCD backgrounds by central jet veto techniques. For a representative setup at the CERN LHC we verify that uncertainties related to parton-shower effects are mild for distributions related to the third jet, in contrast to what has been observed in calculations based on vector-boson fusion induced Higgs production in association with two jets.