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: \( \mathrm{pp}\to V\mathrm{H}+X\to \mathrm{\ell}\overline{\mathrm{\ell}}\mathrm{b}\overline{\mathrm{b}}+X. \) 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 \( \sqrt{s} \) = 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.
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Gauld, R., Ridder, A.GD., Glover, E. et al. Associated production of a Higgs boson decaying into bottom quarks and a weak vector boson decaying leptonically at NNLO in QCD. J. High Energ. Phys. 2019, 2 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP10(2019)002
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP10(2019)002