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Abstract
We present a computation of the next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) QCD corrections to the production of a Higgs boson in association with a W boson at the LHC and the subsequent decay of the Higgs boson into a b-bbar pair, treating the b-quarks as massless. We consider various kinematic distributions and find significant corrections to observables that resolve the Higgs decay products. We also find that a cut on the transverse momentum of the W boson, important for experimental analyses, may have a significant impact on kinematic distributions and radiative corrections. We show that some of these effects can be adequately described by simulating QCD radiation in Higgs boson decays to b-quarks using parton showers. We also describe contributions to Higgs decay to a b-bbar pair that first appear at NNLO and that were not considered in previous fully-differential computations. The calculation of NNLO QCD corrections to production and decay sub-processes is carried out within the nested soft-collinear subtraction scheme presented by some of us earlier this year. We demonstrate that this subtraction scheme performs very well, allowing a computation of the coefficient of the second order QCD corrections at the level of a few per mill.
Highlights
Production of the Higgs boson in association with the W boson pp → WH plays an important role in Higgs physics explorations at the LHC [1,2,3,4]
We present a computation of the next-to-next-to-leading-order (NNLO) QCD corrections to the production of a Higgs boson in association with a W boson at the LHC and the subsequent decay of the Higgs boson into a bbpair, treating the b quarks as massless
We find that a cut on the transverse momentum of the W boson, important for experimental analyses, may have a significant impact on kinematic distributions and radiative corrections
Summary
Production of the Higgs boson in association with the W boson pp → WH plays an important role in Higgs physics explorations at the LHC [1,2,3,4]. This effort started to pay off in the past two to three years, and a large number of fully differential NNLO QCD results for important LHC processes has been obtained using different computational methods [26,27,32,33,34,35,36,37,38] One of these methods, the so-called sector improved residue-subtraction scheme, was developed in Refs. If the quark-antiquark pair comes from gluon splitting, the corresponding process has a double-soft singularity that is different from the one described above; the integral of the respective eikonal factor has to be computed anew. We take the amplitude for VI in an expansion in 1=mtop and the amplitude for RI with the exact mass dependence from Refs. [16,19]
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