New approach to the resummation of logarithms in Higgs-boson decays to a vector quarkonium plus a photon

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel resummation method for logarithms in Higgs decays to vector quarkonium plus a photon, improving the accuracy of theoretical predictions by combining light-cone formalism with nonrelativistic QCD and advanced divergence handling techniques.

Contribution

The paper develops a new Abel summation-based method with Pade approximants for resummation, providing more definitive calculations of decay rates in Higgs to quarkonium processes.

Findings

Resummation effects significantly alter decay amplitude predictions.

Results show reduced sensitivity to Higgs-heavy quark couplings.

Calculated branching fractions align well with previous models.

Abstract

We present a calculation of the rates for Higgs-boson decays to a vector heavy-quarkonium state plus a photon, where the heavy quarkonium states are the J/psi and the Upsilon(nS) states, with n=1, 2, or 3. The calculation is carried out in the light-cone formalism, combined with nonrelativistic QCD factorization, and is accurate at leading order in m_Q^2/m_H^2, where m_Q is the heavy-quark mass and m_H is the Higgs-boson mass. The calculation contains corrections through next-to-leading order in the strong-coupling constant alpha_s and the square of the heavy-quark velocity v, and includes a resummation of logarithms of m_H^2/m_Q^2 at next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy. We have developed a new method, which makes use of Abel summation, accelerated through the use of Pade approximants, to deal with divergences in the resummed expressions for the quarkonium light-cone distribution amplitudes. This approach allows us to make definitive calculations of the resummation effects. Contributions from the order-alpha_s and order-v^2 corrections to the light-cone distribution amplitudes that we obtain with this new method differ substantially from the corresponding contributions that one obtains from a model light-cone distribution amplitude [M. Koenig and M. Neubert, J. High Energy Phys. 08 (2015) 012]. Our results for the real parts of the direct-process amplitudes are considerably smaller than those from one earlier calculation [G. T. Bodwin, H. S. Chung, J.-H. Ee, J. Lee, and F. Petriello, Phys. Rev. D 90, 113010 (2014)], reducing the sensitivity to the Higgs-boson--heavy-quark couplings, and are somewhat smaller than those from another earlier calculation [M. Koenig and M. Neubert, J. High Energy Phys. 08 (2015) 012]. However, our results for the standard-model Higgs-boson branching fractions are in good agreement with those in M. Koenig and M. Neubert, J. High Energy Phys. 08 (2015) 012.