Renormalization-group improved prediction for Higgs production at hadron colliders

We use renormalization-group methods in effective field theory to improve the theoretical prediction for the cross section for Higgs-boson production at hadron colliders. In addition to soft-gluon resummation at N³LL, we also resum enhanced contributions of the form (C _A π α _s ) ⁿ , which arise in the analytic continuation of the gluon form factor to time-like momentum transfer. This resummation is achieved by evaluating the matching corrections arising at the Higgs-boson mass scale at a time-like renormalization point μ ²<0, followed by renormalization-group evolution to μ ²>0. We match our resummed result to NNLO fixed-order perturbation theory and give numerical predictions for the total production cross section as a function of the Higgs-boson mass. Resummation effects are significant even at NNLO, where our improved predictions for the cross sections at the Tevatron and the LHC exceed the fixed-order predictions by about 13% and 8%, respectively, for m _H =120 GeV. We also discuss the application of our technique to other time-like processes such as Drell–Yan production, e ⁺ e ⁻→hadrons, and hadronic decays of the Higgs boson.