Exact Top-Quark Mass Dependence in Hadronic Higgs Production

Abstract

The impact of the finite top-quark mass on the inclusive Higgs production cross section at higher perturbative orders has been an open question for almost three decades. In this Letter, we report on the computation of this effect at next-to-next-to-leading order QCD. For the purely gluonic channel, it amounts to $+0.62\%$ relative to the result obtained in the Higgs effective field theory approximation. The formally subleading partonic channels overcompensate this shift, leading to an overall effect of $-0.26\%$ at a $pp$ collider energy of 13 TeV, and $-0.1\%$ at 8 TeV. This result eliminates one of the main theoretical uncertainties to inclusive Higgs production cross section at the LHC.