Hadron production through Higgs decay at next-to-leading order in the general-mass variable-flavor-number scheme

TL;DR

This paper investigates the impact of b-quark and B-meson masses on the energy distribution of B-mesons from Higgs decay at NLO, revealing significant effects in specific energy regions.

Contribution

It is the first study to incorporate b-quark and B-meson mass effects in the energy distribution analysis within the GM-VFNs scheme for Higgs decays.

Findings

Meson mass significantly enhances decay width at low energy fractions.

B-quark mass increases decay rate around the energy peak.

Mass effects alter the energy distribution shape of B-mesons.

Abstract

It is known that about $60\%$ of all Higgses produced at the CERN-LHC decay into a pair of bottom quarks. Bottoms quickly hadronize, in most cases, into bottom-flavored (B) hadrons before they decay. Therefore, the study of scaled-energy distribution of B-mesons in the decay process $H\to B+Jets$ can be considered as a channel to search for the Higgs characteristics. In all previous studies, authors have ignored the mass effect of b-quarks as well as B-mesons by working in the massless scheme. In this work we, for the first time, study the mass effect of b-quarks as well as produced mesons on the scaled-energy ($x_B$) distribution of B-mesons by working in the massive scheme or general-mass variable-flavor-number scheme (GM-VFNs). We find that the meson mass is responsible for a significant enhancement of partial decay width in the low-$x_B$ region while the b-quark mass leads to an enhancement of the partial decay rate in the peak region and above.