Fully Differential Higgs Pair Production in Association With a $Z$ Boson at Next-to-Next-to-Leading Order in QCD

TL;DR

This paper provides a detailed NNLO QCD calculation for Higgs pair production with a Z boson, crucial for understanding the Higgs self-coupling, and shows significant cross section enhancements and shape modifications.

Contribution

It delivers the first fully differential NNLO QCD prediction for Higgs pair production with a Z boson, improving precision for Higgs self-coupling studies.

Findings

NNLO corrections increase cross sections by 20-50%.

Shape of kinematic distributions is significantly altered.

Results aid in precise determination of Higgs self-coupling.

Abstract

We present a fully differential next-to-next-to-leading order calculation of the Higgs pair production in association with a $Z$ boson, which is important for probing the trilinear Higgs self-coupling. The next-to-next-to-leading-order corrections enhance the next-to-leading order total cross sections by a factor of $1.2\sim 1.5$, depending on the collider energy, and change the shape of next-to-leading order kinematic distributions. We discuss how to determine the trilinear Higgs self-coupling using our results.