Abstract
We present the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) corrections for Higgs boson decays to hadronic final states at next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order (N3LO) in the strong coupling constant αs. In particular, we consider the Higgs boson decay to massless bottom quarks and the Higgs boson decay to a pair of gluons in the limit of a heavy top quark. The tree-level five-parton, the one-loop four-parton, the two-loop three-parton, and the three-loop two-parton matrix elements are integrated separately over the inclusive phase space and classified by partons appearing in the final state and by colour structure. As a check, we reproduce known results for the inclusive hadronic decay rates at N3LO. We study patterns of infrared singularity cancellation within the colour layers of the integrated expressions and we comment on the similarities between H → \( b\overline{b} \) and γ∗ → \( q\overline{q} \). We anticipate that our result will be an essential ingredient for the formulation of N3LO subtraction schemes.
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Acknowledgments
We are indebted to Thomas Gehrmann and Nigel Glover for their feedback and encouragement to pursue this work. We thank Oscar Braun-White, Christian Preuss, Kay Schönwald, Vasily Sotnikov and Tong-Zhi Yang for elucidating discussions and suggestions on the manuscript. This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) under contract 200020-204200 and by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme grant agreement 101019620 (ERC Advanced Grant TOPUP).
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Chen, X., Jakubčík, P., Marcoli, M. et al. The parton-level structure of Higgs decays to hadrons at N3LO. J. High Energ. Phys. 2023, 185 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP06(2023)185
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP06(2023)185