Higgs production in heavy-quark annihilation through next-to-next-to-leading order QCD

The total inclusive cross section for charged and neutral Higgs production in heavy-quark annihilation is presented through NNLO QCD. It is shown that, aside from an overall factor, the partonic cross section is independent of the initial-state quark flavors, and that any interference terms involving two different Yukawa couplings vanish. A simple criterion for defining the central renormalization and factorization scale is proposed. Its application to the bb¯ϕ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$b\bar{b}\phi $$\end{document} process yields results which are compatible with the values usually adopted for this process. Remarkably, we find little variation in these values for the other initial-state quark flavors. Finally, we disentangle the impact of the different parton luminosities from genuine hard NNLO effects and find that, for the central scales, a naive rescaling by the parton luminosities approximates the full result remarkably well.