Soft gluon resummation for gluon-induced Higgs Strahlung

TL;DR

This paper investigates how soft gluon emission affects the predicted cross sections for Higgs production with a Z boson at the LHC, using advanced resummation techniques to improve accuracy and reduce uncertainties.

Contribution

The study applies NLL and NNLL resummation to improve the precision of gluon-induced Higgs Z production predictions at the LHC, reducing theoretical uncertainties.

Findings

Resummation significantly reduces scale uncertainties in $gg\to HZ$ predictions.

Updated cross section estimates with decreased theoretical errors.

Enhanced perturbative stability of the predictions.

Abstract

We study the effect of soft gluon emission on the total cross section predictions for the $gg\to HZ$ associated Higgs production process at the LHC. To this end, we perform resummation of threshold corrections at the NLL accuracy in the absolute threshold production limit and in the threshold limit for production of a $ZH$ system with a given invariant mass. Analytical results and numerical predictions for various possible LHC collision energies are presented. The perturbative stability of the results is verified by including universal NNLL effects. We find that resummation significantly reduces the scale uncertainty of the $gg\to HZ$ contribution, which is the dominant source of perturbative uncertainty to $ZH$ production. We use our results to evaluate updated numbers for the total inclusive cross section of associated $pp \to ZH$ production at the LHC. The reduced scale uncertainty of the $gg\to HZ$ component translates into a decrease of the overall scale error by about a factor of two.