Hadronic Production of a Higgs Boson in Association with a Jet at Next-to-Next-to-Leading Order

Abstract

In this thesis the production of a Higgs boson in association with a hadronic jet at the Large Hadron Collider is studied using the effective interaction between the Higgs boson to gluons induced by a heavy quark. The Leading Order (LO), Next- to-Leading Order (NLO) and Next-to-Next-to-Leading Order (NNLO) perturbative QCD corrections are studied for all of the parton channels. The infrared (IR) diver- gent behaviour of the various contributions to the partonic cross section is regulated using the antenna subtraction formalism. This method has previously been used at NNLO in the calculation of three jets production in the e+e− annihilation and for the gluonic dijet production via proton collision. The research presented in this thesis extends the antenna formalism to include scattering processes in which the initial state parton changes its identity. All contributions to the pp → H+jet pro- cesses are calculated at LO, NLO and NNLO and numerically tested to demonstrate the convergence between the matrix elements and the antenna subtraction terms in the various unresolved limits. As an example of the phenomenological impact of this work, numerical results for the total and differential Higgs plus one jet cross sections are presented for the purely gluonic subprocesses.