High precision determination of the gluon fusion Higgs boson cross-section at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper provides the most precise theoretical prediction for the Higgs boson production cross-section via gluon fusion at the LHC, incorporating advanced QCD, electroweak, and resummation corrections.

Contribution

It introduces a highly accurate calculation of the gluon fusion Higgs cross-section at N$^3$LO in QCD, including finite quark-mass effects, electroweak corrections, and threshold resummation techniques.

Findings

Predicted cross-section for m_H=125 GeV at 13 TeV: 48.58 pb

Estimated theoretical uncertainty: +4.56%/-6.72%

Uncertainty from PDFs and alpha_s: 3.20%

Abstract

We present the most precise value for the Higgs boson cross-section in the gluon-fusion production mode at the LHC. Our result is based on a perturbative expansion through N$^3$LO in QCD, in an effective theory where the top-quark is assumed to be infinitely heavy, while all other Standard Model quarks are massless. We combine this result with QCD corrections to the cross-section where all finite quark-mass effects are included exactly through NLO. In addition, electroweak corrections and the first corrections in the inverse mass of the top-quark are incorporated at three loops. We also investigate the effects of threshold resummation, both in the traditional QCD framework and following a SCET approach, which resums a class of $\pi^2$ contributions to all orders. We assess the uncertainty of the cross-section from missing higher-order corrections due to both perturbative QCD effects beyond N$^3$LO and unknown mixed QCD-electroweak effects. In addition, we determine the sensitivity of the cross-section to the choice of parton distribution function (PDF) sets and to the parametric uncertainty in the strong coupling constant and quark masses. For a Higgs mass of $m_H = 125~{\rm GeV}$ and an LHC center-of-mass energy of $13~{\rm TeV}$, our best prediction for the gluon fusion cross-section is \[ \sigma = 48.58\,{\rm pb} {}^{+2.22\, {\rm pb}\, (+4.56\%)}_{-3.27\, {\rm pb}\, (-6.72\%)} \mbox{ (theory)} \pm 1.56 \,{\rm pb}\, (3.20\%) \mbox{ (PDF+$\alpha_s$)} \]