Electroweak Higgs production with HiggsPO at NLO QCD

TL;DR

This paper introduces the HiggsPO UFO model for simulating electroweak Higgs production at NLO QCD, demonstrating significant QCD corrections and recommending specific distributions for new physics searches.

Contribution

The paper presents a new UFO model for Monte Carlo simulations of Higgs processes at NLO QCD within the Higgs pseudo-observables framework.

Findings

QCD corrections are sizable and largely factorize.

2D distributions of azimuthal-angle difference and jet pT are recommended for new physics searches.

HiggsPO UFO model is publicly available.

Abstract

We present the HiggsPO UFO model for Monte Carlo event generation of electroweak $VH$ and VBF Higgs production processes at NLO in QCD in the formalism of Higgs pseudo-observables (PO). We illustrate the use of this tool by studying the QCD corrections, matched to a parton shower, for several benchmark points in the Higgs PO parameter space. We find that, while being sizable and thus important to be considered in realistic experimental analyses, the QCD higher-order corrections largely factorize. As an additional finding, based on the NLO results, we advocate to consider 2D distributions of the two-jet azimuthal-angle difference and the leading jet $p_T$ for new physics searches in VBF Higgs production. The HiggsPO UFO model is publicly available.