Fully Differential Higgs Boson Production to Third Order in QCD
Abstract
We present 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. To perform our calculation we apply the Projection-to-Born method for the first time to the calculation of the non-factorising production of a colorless final state at the LHC at N3LO. We predict differential distributions for the two photon final state produced by the decay of the Higgs boson and apply fiducial cuts on the photon rapidities and momenta. The N3LO corrections to these differential distributions have 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 stabilisation of the perturbative expansion.