Higgs boson production in association with massive bottom quarks at NNLO+PS

Abstract

We study the production of a Higgs boson in association with a bottom-quark pair ($b \bar b H$) at hadron colliders. Our calculation is performed in the four-flavour scheme with massive bottom quarks. This work presents the first computation of next-to-next-to-leading-order (NNLO) QCD corrections to this process, and we combine them with all-order radiative corrections from a parton shower simulation (NNLO+PS). The calculation is exact, except for the two-loop amplitude, which is evaluated in the small quark mass expansion, which is an excellent approximation for bottom quarks at LHC energies. For the NNLO+PS matching, we employ the MiNNLO$_{\rm PS}$ method for heavy-quark plus colour-singlet production within the POWHEG framework. We present an extensive phenomenological analysis both at the inclusive level and considering bottom jets using flavour-tagging algorithms. By comparing four-flavour and five-flavour scheme predictions at NNLO+PS, we find that the NNLO corrections in the four-flavour scheme resolve the long-standing tension between the two schemes. Finally, we show that our NNLO+PS predictions also have important implications on modelling the $b\bar b H$ background in Higgs-pair measurements.