Differential Cross Section for Higgs Boson Production Including All-Orders Soft Gluon Resummation

Edmond L. Berger, Jianwei Qiu

Published 2002-10-08, updated 2003-03-06Version 2

The transverse momentum $Q_T$ distribution is computed for inclusive Higgs boson production at the energy of the CERN Large Hadron Collider. We focus on the dominant gluon-gluon subprocess in perturbative quantum chromodynamics and incorporate contributions from the quark-gluon and quark-antiquark channels. Using an impact-parameter $b$-space formalism, we include all-orders resummation of large logarithms associated with emission of soft gluons. Our resummed results merge smoothly at large $Q_T$ with the fixed-order expectations in perturbative quantum chromodynamics, as they should, with no need for a matching procedure. They show a high degree of stability with respect to variation of parameters associated with the non-perturbative input at low $Q_T$. We provide distributions $d\sigma/dy dQ_T$ for Higgs boson masses from $M_Z$ to 200 GeV. The average transverse momentum at zero rapidity $y$ grows approximately linearly with mass of the Higgs boson over the range $M_Z < m_h <200$ GeV, $<Q_T> \simeq 0.18 m_h + 18 $~GeV. We provide analogous results for $Z$ boson production, for which we compute $<Q_T> \simeq 25$ GeV. The harder transverse momentum distribution for the Higgs boson arises because there is more soft gluon radiation in Higgs boson production than in $Z$ production.