Bottom quark mass effects in associated <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><mml:mi>W</mml:mi><mml:mi>H</mml:mi></mml:math> production with the <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><mml:mi>H</mml:mi><mml:mo stretchy="false">→</mml:mo><mml:mi>b</mml:mi><mml:mover accent="true"><mml:mi>b</mml:mi><mml:mo stretchy="false">¯</mml:mo></mml:mover></mml:math> decay through NNLO QCD
Arnd Behring, Wojciech Bizoń, Fabrizio Caola, Kirill Melnikov, Raoul Röntsch
Abstract
We present a computation of next-to-next-to-leading-order (NNLO) QCD corrections to the production of a Higgs boson in association with a $W$ boson at the LHC followed by the decay of the Higgs boson to a $b\overline{b}$ pair. At variance with previous NNLO QCD studies of the same process, we treat $b$ quarks as massive. An important advantage of working with massive $b$ quarks is that it makes the use of flavor jet algorithms unnecessary and allows us to employ conventional jet algorithms to define $b$ jets. We compare NNLO QCD descriptions of the associated $WH(b\overline{b})$ production with massive and massless $b$ quarks and also contrast them with the results provided by parton showers. We find $\mathcal{O}(5%)$ differences in fiducial cross sections computed with massless and massive $b$ quarks. We also observe that much larger differences between massless and massive results, as well as between fixed-order and parton-shower results, can arise in selected kinematic distributions.