Fiducial cross sections for Higgs boson production in association with a jet at next-to-next-to-leading order in QCD

TL;DR

This paper advances the precision of Higgs boson production predictions by including decay channels in NNLO QCD calculations, enabling more accurate comparisons with experimental data.

Contribution

It extends NNLO QCD calculations of Higgs plus jet production to include Higgs decays, allowing for realistic fiducial cross section and distribution predictions.

Findings

Computed fiducial cross sections for Higgs decays to gamma gamma and WW in LHC conditions.

Provided detailed kinematic distributions with realistic selection criteria.

Enhanced theoretical predictions for Higgs production in association with a jet.

Abstract

We extend the recent computation of Higgs boson production in association with a jet through next-to-next-to-leading order in perturbative QCD by including decays of the Higgs boson to electroweak vector bosons. This allows us to compute fiducial cross sections and kinematic distributions including realistic selection criteria for the Higgs boson decay products. As an illustration, we present results for $pp \to H + j \to \gamma \gamma + j$ closely following the ATLAS 8 TeV analysis and for $pp \to H+ j \to W W + j \to e^+ \mu^- \nu \bar \nu + j $ in a CMS-like 13 TeV setup.