Top quark mass effects in Higgs boson pair production up to NNLO

TL;DR

This paper investigates the effects of the top quark mass on Higgs boson pair production via gluon fusion, providing approximate calculations up to NNLO to estimate uncertainties related to finite top quark mass effects.

Contribution

It introduces an expansion-based approximation method to include top quark mass effects at NNLO in Higgs pair production calculations.

Findings

Residual uncertainty of about 10% at NLO due to top mass effects

Residual uncertainty of about 5% at NNLO due to top mass effects

Approximate top mass corrections up to rac{1}{M_t^4} at NNLO

Abstract

We consider the production of pairs of Standard Model Higgs bosons via gluon fusion. Until recently the full dependence on the top quark mass $M_t$ was not known at next-to-leading order. For this reason we apply an approximation based on the expansion for large top quark masses up to $\mathcal{O}(1/M_t^{12})$. At next-to-next-to-leading order we avoid the calculation of real corrections via the soft-virtual approximation and obtain top quark mass corrections up to $\mathcal{O}(1/M_t^4)$. We use our results to estimate the residual uncertainty of the total cross section due to a finite top quark mass to be $\mathcal{O}(10\%)$ at next-to-leading order and $\mathcal{O}(5\%)$ at next-to-next-to-leading order.