Fully Differential Higgs Boson Production to Third Order in QCD

TL;DR

This paper provides the first fully differential N$^3$LO QCD predictions for Higgs boson production via gluon fusion, improving accuracy and reducing uncertainties in theoretical calculations relevant for LHC experiments.

Contribution

It introduces the application of the Projection-to-Born method to N$^3$LO calculations for colorless final states at the LHC, enabling fully differential predictions.

Findings

N$^3$LO corrections significantly reduce theoretical uncertainties.

Differential distributions show complex features with some larger corrections than inclusive results.

Perturbative expansion stabilizes with the inclusion of N$^3$LO corrections.

Abstract

We present fully differential predictions for the production cross section of a Higgs boson via the gluon fusion mechanism at next-to-next-to-next-to leading order (N$^3$LO) in QCD perturbation theory. To perform our calculation we apply the Projection-to-Born method for the first time to the calculation of the non-factorising production of a colorless final state at the LHC at N$^3$LO. We predict differential distributions for the two photon final state produced by the decay of the Higgs boson and apply fiducial cuts on the photon rapidities and momenta. The N$^3$LO corrections to these differential distributions have complex features and are in part larger than the inclusive N$^3$LO corrections to the production cross section. Overall, we observe that the inclusion of the N$^3$LO QCD corrections significantly reduces the perturbative uncertainties and leads to a stabilisation of the perturbative expansion.