Boosted Higgs-strahlung off a $W$ boson at next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order in QCD

Abstract

The production of a boosted Higgs boson in association with a charged weak ($W$) boson is a key process to scrutinize the electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism at hadron colliders. This reaction constitutes the dominant Higgs production channel at large transverse momentum, providing unique sensitivity to Higgs-boson interactions with other Standard Model particles as well as to physics beyond the Standard Model. In this Letter, we present the first fully differential calculation of this important scattering process at next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order (N$^3$LO) in perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). We find that the N$^3$LO corrections, amounting to approximately $+2\%$ in the boosted regime, generally lie at the edge of or outside the standard scale variation band of the previous perturbative order. The residual dependence of the N$^3$LO prediction on perturbative scales is reduced to below the percent level, marking a milestone for the Higgs precision program.