Fiducial Higgs and Drell-Yan distributions at N$^3$LL$^\prime$+NNLO with RadISH

TL;DR

This paper provides advanced N$^3$LL$^ extprime$+NNLO predictions for key transverse observables in Higgs and Drell-Yan production at the LHC, improving theoretical accuracy and comparison with experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a fully exclusive N$^3$LL$^ extprime$+NNLO resummation framework using RadISH, including constant terms and recoil effects, for precise LHC predictions.

Findings

Resummation accuracy improved to N$^3$LL$^ extprime$ with constant terms.

Theoretical predictions match LHC data within 2-7% uncertainty.

Recoil effects enhance the agreement with experimental results.

Abstract

We present state-of-the-art predictions for transverse observables relevant to colour-singlet production at the LHC, in particular the transverse momentum of the colour singlet in gluon-fusion Higgs production and in neutral Drell-Yan lepton-pair production, as well as the $\phi^*_\eta$ observable in Drell Yan. We perform a next-to-next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic (N$^3$LL) resummation of such observables in momentum space according to the RadISH formalism, consistently including in our prediction all constant terms of relative order $\alpha_s^3$ with respect to the Born, thereby achieving N$^3$LL$^\prime$ accuracy. The calculation is fully exclusive with respect to the Born kinematics, which allows the application of arbitrary fiducial selection cuts on the decay products of the colour singlet. We supplement our results with a transverse-recoil prescription, accounting for dominant classes of subleading-power corrections in a fiducial setup. The resummed predictions are matched with fixed-order differential spectra at next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) accuracy. A phenomenological comparison is carried out with 13 TeV LHC data relevant to the Higgs to di-photon channel, as well as to neutral Drell-Yan lepton-pair production. Overall, the inclusion of ${\cal O}(\alpha_s^3)$ constant terms, and to a lesser extent of transverse-recoil effects, proves beneficial for the comparison of theoretical predictions to data, leaving a residual theoretical uncertainty in the resummation region at the 2-5% level for Drell-Yan observables, and 5-7% in Higgs production.