Second-order QCD effects in Higgs boson production through vector boson fusion

TL;DR

This paper calculates second-order QCD corrections to Higgs production via vector boson fusion, providing detailed differential results that refine the understanding of higher-order effects on Higgs plus jets production.

Contribution

It presents the first fully differential calculation of second-order QCD corrections to electroweak Higgs production through vector boson fusion using antenna subtraction.

Findings

NNLO corrections are about ±5% in magnitude.

Corrections are mostly uniform across kinematic variables.

Transverse momenta and jet rapidity separation show some dependence.

Abstract

We compute the factorising second-order QCD corrections to the electroweak production of a Higgs boson through vector boson fusion. Our calculation is fully differential in the kinematics of the Higgs boson and of the final state jets, and uses the antenna subtraction method to handle infrared singular configurations in the different parton-level contributions. Our results allow us to reassess the impact of the next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD corrections to electroweak Higgs-plus-three-jet production and of the next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) QCD corrections to electroweak Higgs-plus-two-jet production. The NNLO corrections are found to be limited in magnitude to around $\pm 5\%$ and are uniform in several of the kinematical variables, displaying a kinematical dependence only in the transverse momenta and rapidity separation of the two tagging jets.