Higgs pair production from bottom quark annihilation to NNLO in QCD

Abstract

We present the first results on the two-loop massless QCD corrections to the four-point amplitude $b+\overline{b} \rightarrow H+H$ in the five flavor scheme, treating bottom quarks as massless. This amplitude is sensitive to the trilinear Higgs boson coupling. Our two-loop result for this amplitude constitutes of purely virtual contributions to the next-to-next-to-leading order QCD predictions for the production of a pair of Higgs bosons at the Large Hadron Collider. Using these two loop amplitudes and exploiting the universality of the soft contributions in perturbative QCD, we obtain the NNLO QCD effects in the soft plus virtual approximation. We find that the inclusion of higher order terms reduce the uncertainties resulting from the unphysical renormalisation and factorisation scales.