Higgs-boson production via bottom-quark fusion
Abstract
Higgs bosons with enhanced coupling to bottom quarks are copiously produced at hadron colliders via bb¯→h, where the initial b quarks reside in the proton sea. We reexamine the calculation of the next-to-leading-order cross section for this process and argue that the appropriate factorization scale for the b distribution functions is approximately mh/4, rather than mh, as had been previously assumed. This greatly improves the convergence of the perturbation series, and yields a result with mild factorization-scale dependence. We also show that the leading-order calculation of gg→bb¯h, integrated over the momenta of the final-state particles, is very sensitive to the factorization and renormalization scales. For scales of order mh/4 the gg→bb¯h cross section is comparable to that of bb¯→h, in contrast with the order-of-magnitude discrepancy between these two calculations for the scale mh. The result we obtain improves the prospects for Higgs-boson discovery at hadron colliders for large values of tan β.
- Publication:
-
Physical Review D
- Pub Date:
- May 2003
- DOI:
- 10.1103/PhysRevD.67.093005
- arXiv:
- arXiv:hep-ph/0301033
- Bibcode:
- 2003PhRvD..67i3005M
- Keywords:
-
- 14.80.Bn;
- 12.38.Bx;
- 13.85.Lg;
- 13.87.Ce;
- Standard-model Higgs bosons;
- Perturbative calculations;
- Total cross sections;
- Production;
- High Energy Physics - Phenomenology;
- High Energy Physics - Experiment
- E-Print:
- 19 pages, revtex4, 7 ps figures, references and 1 Table added, slightly more pedagogical introduction