Higgs boson pair production via gluon fusion at N$^3$LO in QCD

TL;DR

This paper provides the most precise theoretical predictions to date for Higgs boson pair production via gluon fusion at hadron colliders, including total cross sections and invariant mass distributions at N$^3$LO in QCD.

Contribution

The paper presents the first N$^3$LO QCD calculations for Higgs pair production via gluon fusion, reducing theoretical uncertainties and improving prediction accuracy.

Findings

N$^3$LO corrections increase cross sections by about 3%.

Scale uncertainty is reduced below 3%.

Invariant mass distribution shape remains nearly unchanged at N$^3$LO.

Abstract

We present next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order (N$^3$LO) QCD predictions for the Higgs boson pair production via gluon fusion at hadron colliders in the infinite top-quark mass limit. Besides the inclusive total cross sections at various collision energies, we also provide the invariant mass distribution of the Higgs boson pair. Our results show that the N$^3$LO QCD corrections enhance the next-to-next-to-leading order cross section by $3.0\%$ ($2.7\%$) at $\sqrt{s}=13~(100)$ TeV, while the scale uncertainty is reduced substantially below $3\%$ ($2\%$). We also find that a judicious scale choice can significantly improve the perturbative convergence. For the invariant mass distribution, our calculation demonstrates that the N$^3$LO corrections improve the scale dependence but almost do not change the shape.