Higgs boson gluon-fusion production in N3LO QCD

TL;DR

This paper computes the Higgs boson production cross-section at hadron colliders to N3LO in QCD, significantly reducing theoretical uncertainties and improving prediction precision in the large top-mass limit.

Contribution

It introduces a novel series expansion method around the threshold to calculate N3LO corrections for Higgs production in QCD.

Findings

N3LO corrections increase the cross-section by about 2.2%.

Scale uncertainty is reduced to 3%, enhancing prediction reliability.

Method enables high-order calculations using threshold expansions.

Abstract

We present the cross-section for the production of a Higgs boson at hadron-colliders at next-to- next-to-next-to-leading order (N3LO) in perturbative QCD. The calculation is based on a method to perform a series expansion of the partonic cross-section around the threshold limit to an arbitrary order. We perform this expansion to sufficiently high order to obtain the value of the hadronic cross at N3LO in the large top-mass limit. For renormalisation and factorisation scales equal to half the Higgs mass, the N3LO corrections are of the order of +2.2%. The total scale variation at N3LO is 3%, reducing the uncertainty due to missing higher order QCD corrections by a factor of three.