Higgs Decay to Gluons at NNLO

Marco Schreck, Matthias Steinhauser

Published 2007-08-07, updated 2007-09-13Version 2

We present an analytical calculation of the next-to-next-to-leading order corrections to the partial decay width $H\to gg$ for a Higgs boson in the intermediate mass range. We apply an asymptotic expansion for $M_H\ll 2M_t$ and compute three terms in the expansion. The leading term confirms the results present in the literature. It is argued that our result is equivalent to an exact calculation up to $M_H\approx M_t$. For a Higgs boson mass of 120 GeV the power-suppressed terms lead to corrections of about 9% in the next-to-next-to-leading order coefficient.