Higgs Boson Production in Association with a Top-Antitop Quark Pair in Next-to-Next-to-Leading Order QCD

Phys Rev Lett. 2023 Mar 17;130(11):111902. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.111902.

Abstract

The associated production of a Higgs boson with a top-antitop quark pair is a crucial process at the LHC since it allows for a direct measurement of the top-quark Yukawa coupling. We present the computation of the radiative corrections to this process at the next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in QCD perturbation theory. This is the very first computation for a 2→3 process with massive colored particles at this perturbative order. We develop a soft Higgs boson approximation for loop amplitudes, which enables us to reliably quantify the impact of the yet unknown two-loop contribution. At the center-of-mass energy sqrt[s]=13 TeV, the NNLO corrections increase the next-to-leading order result for the total cross section by about 4% and lead to a significant reduction of perturbative uncertainties.