Fully Differential Vector-Boson-Fusion Higgs Production at Next-to-Next-to-Leading Order

Tuesday, 8 December 2015 at 11:15 in Y36 J33

We present the calculatation of the fully differential next-to-next-to-leading-order (NNLO) corrections to vector-boson fusion (VBF) Higgs production at the LHC, in the limit in which there is no cross-talk between the hadronic systems associated with the two protons. We explain the new "projection-to-Born" method that we used to combine an inclusive NNLO calculation in the structure-function approach and a suitably factorised next-to-leading-order (NLO) VBF Higgs plus 3-jet calculation. An earlier calculation of the fully inclusive cross section had found very small NNLO corrections, at the 1% level. In contrast, we find that the cross section after typical VBF cuts receives NNLO contributions of about 5-6%, and that standard differential distributions show corrections of up to 10-12%. These corrections are often outside the NLO scale-uncertainty band.