Effective Field Theory for Higgs Plus Jet Production

TL;DR

This paper develops an effective field theory framework including dimension-5 and dimension-7 operators to analyze Higgs plus jet production at NLO QCD, revealing effects of finite top mass and BSM modifications.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive EFT approach with higher-dimensional operators for Higgs plus jet processes, including one significant dimension-7 operator, and provides NLO results with top mass corrections.

Findings

Heavy-top approximation accuracy explained by non-interference of certain amplitudes.

Dimension-7 operator impacts high p_T Higgs production, indicating BSM sensitivity.

NLO results include O(1/m_t^2) corrections, enhancing SM predictions.

Abstract

We use an effective field theory (EFT) which includes all possible gluon-Higgs dimension-5 and dimension-7 operators to study Higgs boson plus jet production in next-to-leading order QCD. The EFT sheds light on the effect of a finite top quark mass as well as any Beyond-the-Standard Model (BSM) modifications of Higgs-gluon effective couplings. In the gluon channel, the accuracy of the heavy-top approximation for differential distributions arises from the non-interference between the helicity amplitudes of the G^3 h and G^2 h operators in the m_h < p_T limit at lowest order. One dimension-7 operator involving quark bilinears, however, contributes significantly at high p_T, and potentially offers a channel for seeing BSM effects. One-loop renormalization of these operators is determined, allowing resummation of large logarithms via renormalization group running. NLO numerical results at the LHC are presented, which include O(1/m_t^2) contributions in the SM limit.