Exclusive Higgs Boson Production with bottom quarks at Hadron Colliders

Abstract

We present the next-to-leading order QCD corrected rate for the production of a scalar Higgs boson with a pair of high p_T bottom and anti-bottom quarks at the Tevatron and at the Large Hadron Collider. Results are given for both the Standard Model and the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model. The exclusive b-bbar-h production rate is small in the Standard Model, but it can be greatly enhanced in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model for large tan(beta), making b-bbar-h an important discovery mode. We find that the next-to-leading order QCD results are much less sensitive to the renormalization and factorization scales than the lowest order results, but have a significant dependence on the choice of the renormalization scheme for the bottom quark Yukawa coupling.