Higgs production in heavy quark annihilation through next-to-next-to-leading order QCD

Understand

The total inclusive cross section for charged and neutral Higgs production in heavy-quark annihilation is presented through NNLO QCD.

• It is shown that, aside from an overall factor, the partonic cross section is independent of the initial-state quark flavors, and that any interference terms involving two different Yukawa couplings vanish.
• A simple criterion for defining the central renormalization and factorization scale is proposed.
• Its application to the $b\bar bH$ process yields results which are compatible with the values usually adopted for this process.