English

Fully differential Higgs boson pair production at N$^3$LO with top quark mass effects

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2026-01-30 v1 High Energy Physics - Experiment

Abstract

Higgs-boson pair production is of fundamental importance for probing the Higgs potential. At hadron colliders, the dominant production channel proceeds via gluon-gluon fusion (ggF) mediated by a top-quark loop. We report the first fully differential predictions for Higgs-boson pair production through ggF at next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order (N3^3LO) in the strong coupling αs\alpha_s in the heavy-top-quark limit (HTL). Fiducial cross section and selected differential distributions are presented at a center-of-mass energy of s\sqrt{s} = 14 TeV, under realistic experimental selection cuts. The N3^3LO QCD corrections reduce the scale uncertainties of the next-to-next-to-leading order fiducial and differential predictions by approximately a factor of three, bringing the theoretical uncertainty to the percent level in the HTL. After incorporating top-quark-mass effects at next-to-leading order in αs\alpha_s, we provide one of the most precise parton-level differential predictions to date for ongoing experimental searches for Higgs-boson pair production at the LHC.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.19990,
  title  = {Fully differential Higgs boson pair production at N$^3$LO with top quark mass effects},
  author = {Xuan Chen and Yuesheng Dai and Hai Tao Li and Shi-Yuan Li and Hua-Sheng Shao and Jian Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.19990},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

35 pages, 13 figures, 5 tables