Higgs production in heavy quark annihilation through next-to-next-to-leading order QCD

TL;DR

This paper calculates the Higgs production cross section in heavy-quark annihilation at NNLO QCD, revealing flavor independence and proposing a scale-setting criterion, with results supporting simplified rescaling methods.

Contribution

It provides the first NNLO QCD calculation of heavy-quark annihilation Higgs production, establishing flavor independence and a practical scale-setting criterion.

Findings

Partonic cross section is flavor-independent aside from an overall factor.

Interference terms involving different Yukawa couplings vanish.

Naive rescaling by parton luminosities approximates full NNLO results.

Abstract

The total inclusive cross section for charged and neutral Higgs production in heavy-quark annihilation is presented through NNLO QCD. It is shown that, aside from an overall factor, the partonic cross section is independent of the initial-state quark flavors, and that any interference terms involving two different Yukawa couplings vanish. A simple criterion for defining the central renormalization and factorization scale is proposed. Its application to the $b\bar bH$ process yields results which are compatible with the values usually adopted for this process. Remarkably, we find little variation in these values for the other initial-state quark flavors. Finally, we disentangle the impact of the different parton luminosities from genuine hard NNLO effects and find that, for the central scales, a naive rescaling by the parton luminosities approximates the full result remarkably well.