Higgs boson production in bottom quark fusion at next-to-next-to-leading order

Abstract

The total cross section for Higgs production in bottom-quark annihilation is evaluated at next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in QCD. This is the first time that all terms at order alpha_s^2 are taken into account. We find a greatly reduced scale dependence with respect to lower order results, for both the factorization and the renormalization scales. The behavior of the result is consistent with earlier determinations of the appropriate factorization scale for this process of mu_F ~ M_H/4, and supports the validity of the bottom parton density approach for computing the total inclusive rate. We present precise predictions for the cross section at the Tevatron and the LHC.