Higgs production in bottom-quark fusion to third order in the strong coupling

Abstract

We present the inclusive cross section at next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order (N$^3$LO) in perturbative QCD for the production of a Higgs boson via bottom-quark fusion. We employ the five-flavour scheme, treating the bottom quark as a massless parton while retaining a non-vanishing Yukawa coupling to the Higgs boson. We find that the dependence of the hadronic cross section on the renormalisation and factorisation scales is substantially reduced. For judicious choices of the scales the perturbative expansion of the cross section shows a convergent behaviour. We present results for the N$^3$LO cross section at various collider energies. In comparison to the cross section obtained from the Santander-matching of the four and five-flavour schemes we predict a slightly higher cross section, though the two predictions are consistent within theoretical uncertainties.Comment: 3 pretty plots with pretty colours. Published versio