Associated ZH production at hadron colliders: the fully differential NNLO QCD calculation

TL;DR

This paper presents a detailed NNLO QCD calculation for associated ZH production at hadron colliders, including Higgs decay to bottom quarks and Z decay with spin correlations, enabling precise kinematic analyses.

Contribution

It provides the first fully differential NNLO QCD computation for ZH production with decay effects, implemented in a flexible Monte Carlo framework.

Findings

NNLO corrections significantly affect the Higgs pT spectrum.

The calculation improves theoretical precision for boosted Higgs analyses.

Inclusion of decay and spin correlations enhances the realism of predictions.

Abstract

We consider Standard Model Higgs boson production in association with a Z boson in hadron collisions. We present a fully exclusive computation of QCD radiative corrections up to next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO). Our calculation includes the Higgs boson decay to bottom quarks (b) in next-to-leading order QCD and the leptonic decay of the Z boson with finite-width effects and spin correlations. The computation is implemented in a parton level Monte Carlo program that makes possible to consider arbitrary kinematical cuts on the final-state leptons, the b jets and the associated QCD radiation, and to compute the corresponding distributions in the form of bin histograms. We assess the impact of QCD radiative effects in the boosted kinematics at the LHC and show that the inclusion of the NNLO corrections is crucial to control the pT spectrum of the Higgs boson candidate.