Two-loop corrections to the triple Higgs boson production cross section

TL;DR

This paper calculates the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) corrections to the production rate of three Higgs bosons via gluon fusion, providing analytical results at next-to-leading order and partial results at next-to-next-to-leading order, which improve prediction accuracy.

Contribution

It presents the first analytical next-to-leading order QCD corrections and computes soft and virtual contributions at next-to-next-to-leading order for triple Higgs production.

Findings

QCD corrections are large at both NLO and NNLO

Scale uncertainty is significantly reduced with NNLO corrections

Provides detailed predictions for cross section and invariant mass distribution

Abstract

In this paper we compute the QCD corrections for the triple Higgs boson production cross section via gluon fusion, within the heavy-top approximation. We present, for the first time, analytical results for the next-to-leading order corrections, and also compute the soft and virtual contributions of the next-to-next-to-leading order cross section. We provide predictions for the total cross section and the triple Higgs invariant mass distribution. We find that the QCD corrections are large at both perturbative orders, and that the scale uncertainty is substantially reduced when the second order perturbative corrections are included.