https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-016-4093-x
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
Higgs production in heavy-quark annihilation through next-to-next-to-leading order QCD
Institute for Theoretical Particle Physics and Cosmology, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, 52056, Germany
* e-mail: robert.harlander@cern.ch
Received:
16
December
2015
Accepted:
12
April
2016
Published online:
2
May
2016
The total inclusive cross section for charged and neutral Higgs production in heavy-quark annihilation is presented through NNLO QCD. It is shown that, aside from an overall factor, the partonic cross section is independent of the initial-state quark flavors, and that any interference terms involving two different Yukawa couplings vanish. A simple criterion for defining the central renormalization and factorization scale is proposed. Its application to the 
process yields results which are compatible with the values usually adopted for this process. Remarkably, we find little variation in these values for the other initial-state quark flavors. Finally, we disentangle the impact of the different parton luminosities from genuine hard NNLO effects and find that, for the central scales, a naive rescaling by the parton luminosities approximates the full result remarkably well.
© The Author(s), 2016
