Inclusive Higgs boson production at the LHC in the kt-factorization approach

TL;DR

This paper studies inclusive Higgs boson production at the LHC using the kt-factorization approach, accounting for gluon transverse momenta, and compares results with experimental data and collinear QCD predictions.

Contribution

It introduces a kt-factorization based analysis of Higgs production, incorporating off-shell gluon effects and different gluon density models, with comprehensive uncertainty estimates.

Findings

Predictions align well with CMS and ATLAS data at 8 and 13 TeV.

The approach provides a good description of Higgs transverse momentum distributions.

Theoretical uncertainties are thoroughly estimated and discussed.

Abstract

We investigate the inclusive Higgs boson production in proton-proton collisions at the CERN LHC conditions using the $k_T$-factorization approach. Our analysis is based on the dominant off-shell gluon-gluon fusion subprocess (where the transverse momenta of initial gluons are taken into account) and covers $H \to \gamma \gamma$, $H \to ZZ^* \to 4l$ (where $l = e,\mu$) and $H \to W^+ W^- \to e^\pm \mu^\mp \nu \bar \nu$ decay channels. The transverse momentum dependent (or unintegrated) gluon densities in a proton were derived from Ciafaloni-Catani-Fiorani-Marchesini equation or, alternatively, were chosen in accordance with Kimber-Martin-Ryskin prescription. We estimate the theoretical uncertainties of our calculations and compare our results with next-to-next-to-leading-order plus next-to-next-to-leading-logarithmic ones obtained using collinear QCD factorization. Our predictions agree well with the latest experimental data taken by the CMS and ATLAS Collaborations at $\sqrt s = 8$ and $13$~TeV.