The transverse momentum QTβ distribution is computed for inclusive Higgs
boson production at the energy of the CERN Large Hadron Collider. We focus on
the dominant gluon-gluon subprocess in perturbative quantum chromodynamics and
incorporate contributions from the quark-gluon and quark-antiquark channels.
Using an impact-parameter b-space formalism, we include all-orders
resummation of large logarithms associated with emission of soft gluons. Our
resummed results merge smoothly at large QTβ with the fixed-order
expectations in perturbative quantum chromodynamics, as they should, with no
need for a matching procedure. They show a high degree of stability with
respect to variation of parameters associated with the non-perturbative input
at low QTβ. We provide distributions dΟ/dydQTβ for Higgs boson masses
from MZβ to 200 GeV. The average transverse momentum at zero rapidity y
grows approximately linearly with mass of the Higgs boson over the range MZβ<mhββ0.18mhβ+18~GeV. We provide analogous results
for Z boson production, for which we compute β25 GeV. The
harder transverse momentum distribution for the Higgs boson arises because
there is more soft gluon radiation in Higgs boson production than in Z
production.Comment: 42 pages, latex, 26 figures. All figures replaced. Some changes in
wording. Published in Phys. Rev. D67, 034026 (2003