Associated production of a Higgs boson at NNLO

Abstract

In this paper we present a Next-to-Next-to Leading Order (NNLO) calculation of the production of a Higgs boson in association with a massive vector boson. We include the decays of the unstable Higgs and vector bosons, resulting in a fully flexible parton-level Monte Carlo implementation. We also include all $\mathcal{O}({\alpha }_s^2)$ contributions that occur in production for these processes: those mediated by the exchange of a single off-shell vector boson in the $s$-channel, and those which arise from the coupling of the Higgs boson to a closed loop of fermions. We study final states of interest for Run II phenomenology, namely $H\to b\bar{b}$, $\gamma \gamma$ and $W{W}^{\ast }$. The treatment of the $H\to b\bar{b}$ decay includes QCD corrections at NLO. We use the recently developed $N$-jettiness regularization procedure, and study its viability in the presence of a large final-state phase space by studying $pp\to V(H\to W{W}^{\ast })\to$ leptons.

Comments: 31 pages, 16 Figues, 3 Tables : v2 Matches published version