Light quark mediated Higgs boson production in association with a jet at the next-to-next-to-leading order and beyond

Abstract

We study the light quark effect on the Higgs boson production in association with a jet at the LHC in the intermediate transverse momentum region between the quark and the Higgs boson mass scales. Though the effect is suppressed by the small Yukawa coupling, it is enhanced by large logarithms of the quark mass ratio to the Higgs boson mass or transverse momentum. Following a remarkable success of the logarithmic expansion [40] for the prediction of the next-to-next-to-leading bottom quark contribution to the total cross section of the Higgs boson production we extend the analysis to its kinematical distributions. A new factorization formula is derived for the light quark mediated gg → Hg amplitudes and the differential cross section of the process is computed in the logarithmic approximation, which is used for an estimate of the bottom quark effect at the next-to-next-to-leading order.