Abstract
The first computation of Higgs production in association with three jets at NLO in QCD has recently been performed using the effective theory, where the top quark is treated as an infinitely heavy particle and integrated out. This approach is restricted to the regions in phase space where the typical scales are not larger than the top quark mass. Here we investigate this statement at a quantitative level by calculating the leading-order contributions to the production of a Standard Model Higgs boson in association with up to three jets taking full top-quark and bottom-quark mass dependence into account. We find that the transverse momentum of the hardest particle or jet plays a key role in the breakdown of the effective theory predictions, and that discrepancies can easily reach an order of magnitude for transverse momenta of about 1 TeV. The impact of bottom-quark loops is found to be visible in the small transverse momentum region, leading to corrections of up to 5 percent. We further study the impact of mass corrections when VBF selection cuts are applied and when the center-of-mass energy is increased to 100 TeV.
Highlights
Producing a Higgs boson out of two off-shell gluons in the effective and in the full theory [2
Calculations of higher order corrections to the production of a Higgs boson in association with jets rely on the approximation of an infinitely heavy top quark
For the LHC, we investigated the impact of finite mass effects when vector boson fusion (VBF) selections cuts are applied on the tagging jets, in order to enhance the VBF signal
Summary
In this paper we will compare predictions for the production of a Higgs boson in association with one, two or three jets at LO and next-to-leading order (NLO) in the effective Higgsgluon theory, already computed in [20, 21], with predictions at LO in the full SM for all three multiplicities. All the remaining subprocesses are related by crossing symmetry Both the one-loop amplitudes for the NLO effective theory results as well as the oneloop amplitudes for the LO results with mass dependence were generated using GoSam [22, 23], a publicly available package for the automated generation of one-loop amplitudes. Because of the high statistics needed for such a large multiplicity final state, the Monte Carlo events are stored in the form of Root Ntuples They are generated by Sherpa and were first used in the context of vector boson production in association with jets [46]. They allow the user to change a posteriori both the renormalization and the factorization scales as well as the choice of the parton distribution functions (PDFs). More details about the format of the Ntuples and an extension of their content used for this work are discussed in appendix A
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