Fully exclusive heavy quark-antiquark pair production from a colourless initial state at NNLO in QCD

TL;DR

This paper develops a local subtraction scheme for precise NNLO QCD calculations of heavy quark-antiquark pair production from a colourless initial state, demonstrated on Higgs decay to bottom quarks.

Contribution

It introduces a refined, fully analytic subtraction scheme for NNLO QCD corrections applicable to heavy quark pair production from a colourless initial state.

Findings

Successfully computed NNLO corrections to Higgs decay to bottom quarks.

Provided a detailed, implementable subtraction scheme for complex QCD calculations.

Achieved fully differential decay rate at NNLO accuracy.

Abstract

We present a local subtraction scheme for computing next-to-next-to-leading order QCD corrections to the production of a massive quark-antiquark pair from a colourless initial state. The subtraction terms are built following the CoLoRFulNNLO method and refined in such a way that their integration gives rise to compact, fully analytic expressions. All ingredients necessary for a numerical implementation of our subtraction scheme are provided in detail. As an example, we calculate the fully differential decay rate of the Standard Model Higgs boson to massive bottom quarks at next-to-next-to-leading order accuracy in perturbative QCD.