Higgs plus jet production in bottom quark annihilation at next-to-leading order

Abstract

The cross section for Higgs+jet production in bottom quark annihilation is calculated through NLO QCD. The five-flavour scheme is used to derive this contribution to the Higgs+jet production cross section which becomes numerically important in the MSSM for large values of tan β. We present numerical results for a proton collider with 14 TeV center-of-mass energy. The NLO matrix elements for dσ/dp T are then combined with the total inclusive cross section in order to derive the integrated cross section with a maximum cut on p T at next-to-next-to-leading order.

Analytic results for Higgs production in bottom fusion

“…The partonic cross section is a distribution in Q 2 , the invariant mass of the final state QCD partons. The results agree numerically with an implementation based on Catani-Seymour subtraction [36].…”

“…As well as being of phenomenological interest in their own right (numerical analyses have already been presented [36]), our results can form part of a differential NNLO calculation, perhaps along the lines of ref. [49].…”

“…As well as providing a very strong check on the results of ref. [36], our results allow us to analytically take the p T → 0 limit, and thus derive expressions for the resummation coefficients which govern the structure of large logarithms. This will be described in section 5.…”

“…Without b tagging, this process is a contribution to the total H+jet cross section, and must be considered alongside gluon fusion. For this case various distributions at NLO have been presented [36], based on Catani-Seymour subtraction. In this paper we give the same cross section analytically.…”

“…The strongest check is a comparison with a Monte Carlo numerical code [36] based on the Catani Seymour [42] subtraction formalism. We find excellent agreement for all channels.…”