Approximate N^3LO Higgs-boson production cross section using physical-kernel constraints

TL;DR

This paper estimates the N^3LO Higgs production cross section using physical-kernel constraints and threshold expansion, providing improved theoretical predictions with quantified uncertainties.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to approximate the N^3LO corrections for Higgs production by leveraging physical-kernel constraints and known DIS results.

Findings

N^3LO corrections increase the cross section by about 10% at 14 TeV.

Uncertainty from hard-scattering cross sections is estimated to be no more than 5%.

The results reduce the theoretical uncertainty in Higgs production predictions.

Abstract

The single-logarithmic enhancement of the physical kernel for Higgs production by gluon-gluon fusion in the heavy top-quark limit is employed to derive the leading so far unknown contributions, ln^{5,4,3}(1-z), to the N^3LO coefficient function in the threshold expansion. Also using knowledge from Higgs-exchange DIS to estimate the remaining terms not vanishing for z = m_H^2/s^hat -> 1, these results are combined with the recently completed soft + virtual contributions to provide an uncertainty band for the complete N^3LO correction. For the 2008 MSTW parton distributions these N^3LO contributions increase the cross section at 14 TeV by (10 +- 2)% and (3 +- 2.5)% for the standard choices mu_R = m_H and mu_R = m_H/2 of the renormalization scale. The remaining uncertainty arising from the hard-scattering cross sections can be quantified as no more than 5%, which is smaller than that due to the strong coupling and the parton distributions.