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Parton-shower and fixed-order QCD effects in Higgs boson production in weak-boson fusion and its decays to bottom quarks

Arnd Behring1,*, Kirill Melnikov2,†, Ivan Novikov2,‡, and Giulia Zanderighi1,3,§

  • *Contact author: abehring@mpp.mpg.de
  • †Contact author: kirill.melnikov@kit.edu
  • ‡Contact author: ivan.novikov@kit.edu
  • §Contact author: zanderighi@mpp.mpg.de
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Phys. Rev. D 112, 074033 – Published 24 October, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/wdgh-1dn3

Abstract

Recently, it was observed that an aggressive cut on the b jets’ transverse momenta applied to Higgs boson production in weak-boson fusion followed by the decay H→bb¯ leads to very large QCD corrections to the fiducial cross section. In this paper, we show that these corrections are caused by soft and collinear QCD radiation and, therefore, can be efficiently treated by a parton shower. We combine the parton-shower description of the decay H→bb¯ with next-to-next-to-leading order QCD corrections to Higgs production in weak-boson fusion and its subsequent decay and demonstrate that the quality of the theoretical prediction is markedly improved even if b jets with rather high transverse momenta are selected. The remaining uncertainty of the theoretical prediction, mainly driven by imprecise modeling of H→bb¯ decay, is estimated to be of the order of O(5–7%).

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Phys. Rev. D 112, 074033– Published 24 October, 2025
  • Received 11 July 2025
  • Accepted 5 September 2025
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