Fully Differential Higgs Boson Production to Third Order in QCD

Abstract

We present the first fully differential predictions for the production cross section of a Higgs boson via the gluon fusion mechanism at next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order (N3LO) in QCD perturbation theory. Differential distributions are shown for the two-photon final state produced by the decay of the Higgs boson for a realistic set of fiducial cuts. The N3LO corrections exhibit complex features and are in part larger than the inclusive N3LO corrections to the production cross section. Overall, we observe that the inclusion of the N3LO QCD corrections significantly reduces the perturbative uncertainties and leads to a stabilization of the perturbative expansion.