Higgs boson decay to massive bottom quarks at order ${\alpha }_s^4$ induced by top-quark Yukawa couplings

Abstract

The Higgs boson decay to massive bottom quarks has the largest branching ratio. The decay is mainly induced by the bottom-quark Yukawa coupling with the decay rate calculated up to $O({\alpha }_s^4)$ assuming the massless final-state bottom quark. The top-quark Yukawa coupling induced contribution starts at $O({\alpha }_s^2)$, and exhibits logarithmic and power enhancements, making the perturbative expansion converge slowly, which is a feature not present in the hadronic Higgs boson decay. We present a calculation of such contributions at $O({\alpha }_s^4)$ to the decay into massive bottom quarks in which the squared amplitudes contain two top-quark Yukawa couplings and the final state must include at least a bottom quark pair. We find that they increase the decay width, relative to the result up to $O({\alpha }_s^3)$, by $0.4\%$, larger than the experimental precision at future lepton colliders, and reduce the scale dependence significantly down to $0.4\%$.

Comments: 15 pages, 4 figures, version published in JHEP