Fully differential VBF Higgs production at NNLO

Abstract: We calculate the fully differential next-to-next-to-leading-order (NNLO) corrections to vector-boson fusion (VBF) Higgs production at proton colliders, in the limit in which there is no cross-talk between the hadronic systems associated with the two protons. We achieve this using a new "projection-to-Born" method that combines an inclusive NNLO calculation in the structure-function approach and a suitably factorised next-to-leading-order (NLO) VBF Higgs plus 3-jet calculation, using appropriate Higgs plus 2-parton counter events. An earlier calculation of the fully inclusive cross section had found small NNLO corrections, at the 1% level. In contrast, the cross section after typical experimental VBF cuts receives NNLO contributions of about 4%, while differential distributions show corrections of up to 6-7% for some standard observables. The corrections are often outside the NLO scale-uncertainty band.