NNLOPS accurate associated HZ production with NLO decay ${\rm{H}} \to b\bar{b}$

TL;DR

This paper develops a highly precise theoretical simulation for associated Higgs-Z boson production with Higgs decay into bottom quarks, combining NNLO accuracy with parton shower matching for realistic collider predictions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel NNLO+PS framework for HZ production with H→bb decay, including gg→HZ contributions, improving the accuracy of collider process simulations.

Findings

Provides NNLO accurate predictions for HZ production at 13 TeV.

Includes the gg→HZ contribution at order α_s^2.

Demonstrates improved modeling of HZ production with decay and QCD corrections.

Abstract

We present a next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) accurate description of associated HZ production, followed by the Higgs boson decay into a pair of $b$-quarks treated at next-to-leading order (NLO), consistently matched to a parton shower (PS). The matching is achieved by performing reweighting of the $\texttt{HZJ-MiNLO}$ events, using multi-dimensional distributions that are fully-differential in the HZ Born kinematics, to the NNLO results obtained by using the $\texttt{MCFM-8.0}$ fixed-order calculation. Additionally we include the $gg\to\rm{HZ}$ contribution to the discussed process that appears at the $\mathcal{O}(\alpha_s^2)$. We present phenomenological results obtained for 13 TeV hadronic collisions.