Nonfactorizable QCD Effects in Higgs Boson Production via Vector Boson Fusion

We discuss nonfactorizable QCD corrections to Higgs boson production in vector boson fusion at the Large Hadron Collider. We point out that these corrections can be computed in the eikonal approximation retaining all the terms that are not suppressed by the ratio of the transverse momenta of the tagging jets to the total center-of-mass energy. Our analysis shows that in certain kinematic distributions the nonfactorizable corrections can be as large as a percent making them quite comparable to their factorizable counterparts.

Figure 1

The Feynman diagrams for the Higgs boson production in VBF: (a) the Born amplitude, and (b),(c) the one-loop nonfactorizable QCD corrections. The solid, dashed, wavy, and loopy lines stay for quark, Higgs, vector boson, and gluon fields, respectively.

Figure 2

One- and two-loop transversal space Feynman diagrams.

Figure 3

Differential cross sections for the transverse momentum distributions for the two leading jets $p_{j_1,\perp }$ and $p_{j_2,\perp }$ and for the Higgs boson $p_{h,\perp }$, as well as the rapidity distributions of the first jet and of the Higgs boson in VBF at the 13 TeV LHC. We also show the rapidity difference distribution of the two tagging jets; see text for details. Sizable fluctuations of the correction factor in the regions where the leading order distributions vanish are of statistical origin.