High precision determination of the gluon fusion Higgs boson cross-section at the LHC

Abstract

We present the most precise value for the Higgs boson cross-section in the gluon-fusion production mode at the LHC. Our result is based on a perturbative expansion through N³LO in QCD, in an effective theory where the top-quark is assumed to be infinitely heavy, while all other Standard Model quarks are massless. We combine this result with QCD corrections to the cross-section where all finite quark-mass effects are included exactly through NLO. In addition, electroweak corrections and the first corrections in the inverse mass of the top-quark are incorporated at three loops. We also investigate the effects of threshold resummation, both in the traditional QCD framework and following a SCET approach, which resums a class of π² contributions to all orders. We assess the uncertainty of the cross-section from missing higher-order corrections due to both perturbative QCD effects beyond N³LO and unknown mixed QCD-electroweak effects. In addition, we determine the sensitivity of the cross-section to the choice of parton distribution function (PDF) sets and to the parametric uncertainty in the strong coupling constant and quark masses. For a Higgs mass of m _H = 125 GeV and an LHC center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV, our best prediction for the gluon fusion cross-section is

$$ \sigma =48.58\;{\mathrm{pb}}_{-3.27\;\mathrm{p}\mathrm{b}}^{+2.22\;\mathrm{p}\mathrm{b}}\left(\mathrm{theory}\right)\pm 1.56\;\mathrm{p}\mathrm{b}\left(3.20\%\right)\left(\mathrm{P}\mathrm{D}\mathrm{F}+{\alpha}_s\right). $$