NNLOPS description of the H→ b$\overline{b}$ decay with MiNLO

Abstract

We present an event generator that describes the Higgs boson decay into b-quarks at next-to-next-to-leading-order (NNLO) in QCD and allows for a consistent matching to parton shower. For this purpose, we work within the POWHEG framework and employ the MiNLO method to produce an NNLO-accurate H →b$\overline{b}$ event sample which can further be interfaced with a generic Higgs boson production mode. The resulting events, that combine Higgs production and decay, can be matched to parton shower by means of a vetoed shower. As an example, we present a short phenomenological study for associated Higgs production (HZ) and vector boson fusion (VBF) processes. We release the source code that was used to obtain these results as an h_bbg user process in POWHEG-BOX-V$_{2}$. We also provide tools that enable interfacing the decay events with events for an arbitrary Higgs production mode and subsequent matching of the combined Les Houches (LH) events with a parton shower