Higgs production in association with bottom quarks

TL;DR

This paper provides detailed next-to-leading order QCD predictions for Higgs production with bottom quarks at 13 TeV LHC, including parton shower matching, scheme comparisons, and interference effects.

Contribution

It introduces fully differential, unweighted event simulations for Higgs + bottom quark production using MC@NLO, comparing four- and five-flavour schemes and including resummation effects.

Findings

Consistent results between four- and five-flavour schemes for exclusive observables.

Resummed transverse momentum distribution at NNLO+NNLL accuracy.

Quantified interference effects between $b\bar{b}H$ and gluon-fusion modes.

Abstract

We study the production of a Higgs boson in association with bottom quarks in hadronic collisions, and present phenomenological predictions relevant to the 13 TeV LHC. Our results are accurate to the next-to-leading order in QCD, and matched to parton showers through the MC@NLO method; thus, they are fully differential and based on unweighted events, which we shower by using both Herwig++ and Pythia8. We perform the computation in both the four-flavour and the five-flavour schemes, whose results we compare extensively at the level of exclusive observables. In the case of the Higgs transverse momentum, we also consider the analytically-resummed cross section up to the NNLO+NNLL accuracy. In addition, we analyse at ${\cal O}(\alpha_S^3)$ the effects of the interference between the $b\bar{b}H$ and gluon-fusion production modes.