Higgs-boson production in the full theory at NNLO+PS

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive calculation of Higgs boson production via gluon fusion at NNLO+PS, fully accounting for top-quark mass effects without approximations, improving precision for LHC predictions.

Contribution

It provides the first fully differential NNLO QCD calculation of Higgs production including exact top-quark mass dependence in the full Standard Model.

Findings

Top-quark mass effects significantly influence Higgs production observables.

The calculation enhances the precision of theoretical predictions for LHC analyses.

Matching NNLO calculations with parton showers improves simulation realism.

Abstract

We consider the production of a Standard-Model (SM) Higgs boson in gluon fusion in hadronic collisions and compute the QCD corrections up to next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) and match them to parton showers (NNLO+PS). The complete dependence on the top-quark mass is taken into account without making any approximations to the top quark loops mediating the coupling between the gluons and the Higgs boson. To this end, we have included the $gg\to H$ amplitudes up to three loops and the $pp\to H$+jet amplitudes up to two loops in the full SM theory. This is the first fully differential calculation of the top-quark mass effects up to NNLO in QCD, and we study their impact on relevant observables for the LHC.