$gg \to ZH$ at NLO matched to parton showers with ggxy and POWHEG

TL;DR

This paper implements NLO QCD corrections to the gg to ZH process in ggxy, incorporating leptonic decays and interfacing with POWHEG for parton shower simulations, enhancing precision in collider predictions.

Contribution

It introduces a flexible framework for NLO calculations of gg to ZH, including leptonic decays with spin correlations and an interface to parton shower programs like Pythia.

Findings

Enhanced accuracy in gg to ZH cross section predictions.

Inclusion of leptonic decays with spin correlations.

Compatibility with parton shower simulations.

Abstract

We implement the recently-calculated analytic expressions for the next-to-leading order QCD corrections to $gg\to ZH$ in ggxy. This provides a flexible framework for investigating partonic and hadronic cross sections for various top quark mass renormalization schemes. We augment the $Z$ boson with leptonic decays, including spin correlations and off-shell effects, and furthermore provide an interface to POWHEG. This enables simulations with parton showers, performed using Pythia.