Bottom-quark effects in Higgs production at intermediate transverse momentum

Fabrizio Caola,Kirill Melnikov,Christopher Wever,Lorenzo Tancredi,Jonas M Lindert,Pier Francesco Monni

doi:10.1007/jhep09(2018)035

Abstract

We provide a precise description of the Higgs boson transverse momentum distribution including top and bottom quark contributions, that is valid for transverse momenta in the range mb ≲ p⊥ ≲ mt, where mb and mt are the bottom and top quark masses. This description is based on a combination of fixed next-to-leading order (NLO) results with next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic (NNLL) transverse momentum resummation. We show that ambiguities in the resummation procedure for the b-quark loops are of the same order as the related fixed-order uncertainties. We conclude that the current uncertainty in the top-bottom interference contribution to the Higgs transverse momentum spectrum is mathcal{O}left(20%right) .

Highlights

A important and highly non-trivial kinematic distribution is the Higgs boson transverse momentum spectrum
The goal of this paper is to study the Higgs p⊥ spectrum including top and bottomquark contributions at next-to-leading order combined with next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic transverse momentum resummation (NLO+NNLL)
We find that the uncertainty in our matched NLO+NNLL result for the top-bottom interference contribution to the Higgs transverse momentum distribution in the region 10 GeV ∼< p⊥ ∼< 100 GeV

Summary

Introduction

A important and highly non-trivial kinematic distribution is the Higgs boson transverse momentum spectrum. As we explained in the previous paragraphs, the accuracy of both resummed and fixed-order computations has been constantly increasing; as a result, the mt → ∞ top-loop mediated contribution to the Higgs transverse momentum distribution is currently known with a precision of about 10 − 15 percent for all values of the Higgs p⊥ [7,8,9,10,11, 29] Having reached this level of understanding in the mt → ∞ limit, it is essential to ask if additional small effects, that could have been neglected previously, need to be accounted for at the present level of accuracy and, if so, if they are sufficiently well understood. For moderate values of transverse momenta, electroweak contributions to the Higgs p⊥ spectrum are smaller [31] and we neglect them in what follows

Objectives

Results

Conclusion