Higgs Boson Production at Hadron Colliders with Soft Gluon Effects: I. Backgrounds

Abstract

The gold-plated discovery mode of a Standard Model like Higgs boson at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the H -> Z^0 Z^0 decay mode. To find and then measure the properties of the Higgs, it is crucial to have the most precise theoretical prediction both for the signal and the QCD background in this mode. In this work we calculate the effects of the initial-state multiple soft-gluon emission on the kinematic distributions of photon and Z^0 pairs produced in hadron collisions. The Collins-Soper-Sterman formalism is extended to resum the large logarithmic terms due to soft-gluons. The resummed total rates, the invariant mass, transverse momentum, and rapidity distributions of the photon and Z^0 pairs, and the transverse momentum distributions of the individual vector bosons are presented and compared to the fixed order predictions in the whole kinematic range, for the LHC energies and for the upgraded Fermilab Tevatron. Our conclusion is that the resummed predictions should be used when extracting the Higgs signal at the LHC.