Electroweak corrections to Higgs-strahlung off W/Z bosons at the Tevatron and the LHC with Hawk

Abstract

The associate production of Higgs bosons with W or Z bosons, known as Higgs-strahlung, is an important search channel for Higgs bosons at the hadron colliders Tevatron and LHC for low Higgs-boson masses. We refine a previous calculation of next-to-leading-order electroweak corrections (and recalculate the QCD corrections) upon including the leptonic decay of the W/Z bosons, thereby keeping the fully differential information of the 2-lepton + Higgs final state. The gauge invariance of the W/Z-resonance treatment is ensured by the use of the complex-mass scheme. The electroweak corrections, which are at the level of − (5−10)% for total cross sections, further increase in size with increasing transverse momenta p_T in differential cross sections. For instance, for p_T,H 200 GeV, which is the interesting range at the LHC, the electroweak corrections to WH production reach about −14% for M_H = 120 GeV. The described corrections are implemented in the Hawk Monte Carlo program, which was initially designed for the vector-boson-fusion channel, and are discussed for various distributions in the production channels .