Associated production of a Higgs boson decaying into bottom quarks and a weak vector boson decaying leptonically at NNLO in QCD

Gauld, R.; Ridder, A. Gehrmann-De; Glover, E.W.N.; Huss, A.; Majer, I.

Abstract

We present the calculation of next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) corrections in perturbative QCD for the production of a Higgs boson decaying into a pair of bottom quarks in association with a leptonically decaying weak vector boson: pp → V H+X → ` ¯` bb +¯ X. We consider the corrections to both the production and decay sub-processes, retaining a fully differential description of the final state including off-shell propagators of the Higgs and vector boson. The calculation is carried out using the antenna subtraction formalism and is implemented in the NNLOjet framework. Clustering and identification of b-jets is performed with the flavour-kt algorithm and results for fiducial cross sections and distributions are presented for the LHC at √ s = 13 TeV. We assess the residual theory uncertainty by varying the production and decay scales independently and provide scale uncertainty bands in our results, yielding percent-level accurate predictions for observables in this Higgs production mode computed at NNLO. Confronting a na¨ıve perturbative expansion of the cross section against the customary re-scaling procedure to a fixed branching ratio reveals that starting from NNLO, the latter could be inadequate in estimating missing higher-order effects through scale variations.

Citation

Gauld, R., Ridder, A. G.-D., Glover, E., Huss, A., & Majer, I. (2019). Associated production of a Higgs boson decaying into bottom quarks and a weak vector boson decaying leptonically at NNLO in QCD. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2019(10), Article 2. https://doi.org/10.1007/jhep10%282019%29002

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Sep 2, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Oct 3, 2019
• Publication Date: Oct 3, 2019
• Deposit Date: Oct 18, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 18, 2019
• Journal: Journal of High Energy Physics
• Print ISSN: 1126-6708
• Publisher: Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 2019
• Issue: 10
• Article Number: 2
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/jhep10%282019%29002
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1282404