# Higgs 2020

Oct 26 – 30, 2020
Europe/Rome timezone
There is a live webcast for this event.

## Bottom quark mass effects in associated $WH$ production with the $H \to b\bar{b}$ decay through NNLO QCD

Not scheduled
3h
Precision Session

### Speaker

Arnd Behring (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT))

### Description

We present a computation of next-to-next-to-leading-order (NNLO) QCD corrections to the production of a Higgs boson in association with a $W$ boson at the LHC followed by the decay of the Higgs boson to a $b\bar{b}$ pair. At variance with previous NNLO QCD studies of the same process, we treat $b$ quarks as massive. An important advantage of working with massive b quarks is that it makes the use of flavor jet algorithms unnecessary and allows us to employ conventional jet algorithms to define b jets. We compare NNLO QCD descriptions of the associated $WH(b\bar{b})$ production with massive and massless $b$ quarks and also contrast them with the results provided by parton showers. We find $O(5\%)$ differences in fiducial cross sections computed with massless and massive $b$ quarks. We also observe that much larger differences between massless and massive results, as well as between fixed-order and parton-shower results, can arise in selected kinematic distributions.

### Primary author

Arnd Behring (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT))

### Co-authors

Fabrizio Caola (University of Oxford) Kirill Melnikov (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)) Raoul Horst Rontsch (CERN)

### Presentation materials

There are no materials yet.