Fully Differential Higgs Boson Production to Third Order in QCD

Abstract

We present fully differential predictions for the production cross section of a Higgs boson via the gluon fusion mechanism at next-to-next-to-next-to leading order (N${}^3$LO) in QCD perturbation theory. To perform our calculation we apply the Projection-to-Born method for the first time to the calculation of the non-factorising production of a colorless final state at the LHC at N${}^3$LO. We predict differential distributions for the two photon final state produced by the decay of the Higgs boson and apply fiducial cuts on the photon rapidities and momenta. The N${}^3$LO corrections to these differential distributions have complex features and are in part larger than the inclusive N${}^3$LO corrections to the production cross section. Overall, we observe that the inclusion of the N${}^3$LO QCD corrections significantly reduces the perturbative uncertainties and leads to a stabilisation of the perturbative expansion.

Comments: 7 pages, 5 figures. Version accepted for publication in PRL