Exact top-quark mass dependence in hadronic Higgs production

Understand

The impact of the finite top-quark mass on the inclusive Higgs production cross section at higher perturbative orders has been an open question for almost three decades.

• In this paper, we report on the computation of this effect at NNLO QCD.
• For the purely gluonic channel, it amounts to $+0.62\%$ relative to the result obtained in the HEFT approximation.
• The formally sub-leading partonic channels over-compensate this shift, leading to an overall effect of $-0.32\%$ at a $pp$ collider energy of $13\,\mathrm{TeV}$, and $-0.16\%$ at $8\,\mathrm{TeV}$.