Associated production of a Higgs boson at NNLO

Abstract: In this paper we present a Next-to-Next-to Leading Order (NNLO) calculation of the production of a Higgs boson in association with a massive vector boson. We include the decays of the unstable Higgs and vector bosons, resulting in a fully flexible parton-level Monte Carlo implementation. We also include all O(αs2) contributions that occur in production for these processes: those mediated by the exchange of a single off-shell vector boson in the s-channel, and those which arise from the coupling of the Higgs boson to a closed loop of fermions. We study final states of interest for Run II phenomenology, namely H→ bb¯ , γγ and WW^∗. The treatment of the H→ bb¯ decay includes QCD corrections at NLO. We use the recently developed N -jettiness regularization procedure, and study its viability in the presence of a large final-state phase space by studying pp → V (H → WW^∗) → leptons.