# Associated production of a Higgs boson decaying into bottom quarks at the LHC in full NNLO QCD

## TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive NNLO QCD calculation for Higgs production with bottom quarks and vector bosons at the LHC, including decay effects, which improves the precision of theoretical predictions for experimental comparisons.

## Contribution

It provides the first fully exclusive NNLO QCD calculation for Higgs production with bottom quarks in association with W/Z bosons, including decay and spin correlations.

## Key findings

- NNLO QCD corrections significantly reduce the accepted cross section.
- Corrections substantially alter the shape of key distributions.
- Inclusion of decay and spin effects is crucial for accurate predictions.

## Abstract

We consider the production of a Standard Model Higgs boson decaying to bottom quarks in association with a vector boson W/Z in hadron collisions. We present a fully exclusive calculation of QCD radiative corrections both for the production cross section and for the Higgs boson decay rate up to next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) accuracy. Our calculation also includes the leptonic decay of the vector boson with finite-width effects and spin correlations. We consider typical kinematical cuts applied in the experimental analyses at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and we find that the full NNLO QCD corrections significantly decrease the accepted cross section and have a substantial impact on the shape of distributions. We point out that these additional effects are essential to obtain precise theoretical predictions to be compared with the LHC data.