SciPost logo

SciPost Submission Page

$gg \to ZH$ : updated predictions at NLO QCD

by Benjamin Campillo Aveleira, Long Chen, Joshua Davies, Giuseppe Degrassi, Pier Paolo Giardino, Ramona Gröber, Gudrun Heinrich, Stephen Jones, Matthias Kerner, Johannes Schlenk, Matthias Steinhauser, Marco Vitti

This is not the latest submitted version.

Submission summary

Authors (as registered SciPost users): Gudrun Heinrich · Marco Vitti
Submission information
Preprint Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09905v1  (pdf)
Date submitted: Aug. 25, 2025, 1:09 p.m.
Submitted by: Marco Vitti
Submitted to: SciPost Physics Community Reports
 for consideration in Collection:
Ontological classification
Academic field: Physics
Specialties:
  • High-Energy Physics - Experiment
  • High-Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

We present state-of-the-art predictions for the inclusive cross section of gluon-initiated $ZH$ production, following the recommendations of the LHC Higgs Working Group. In particular, we include NLO QCD corrections, where the virtual corrections are obtained from the combination of a forward expansion and a high-energy expansion, and the real corrections are exact. The expanded results for the virtual corrections are compared in detail to full numerical results. The updated predictions show a reduction of the scale uncertainties to the level of 15%, and they include an estimate of the top-mass-scheme uncertainty.

Current status:
Has been resubmitted

Reports on this Submission

Report #1 by Anonymous (Referee 1) on 2025-10-2 (Invited Report)

Strengths

1-This is a well written contribution, where the current status of the NLO corrections to $gg\to ZH$ is discussed.
2-The two independent computations of the NLO cross sections are carefully compared and new state of the art predictions are presented, which are based on the approximated analytic computation. The differences are shown to be negligible.
3-The discussion includes a detailed analysis of the remaining uncertainties.

Weaknesses

1-My only concern regards the interplay of the $gg\to ZH$ cross section with the Drell-Yan like production process. The two production mechanisms are not independent, they start to interfere at ${\cal O}(\alpha_S^2)$. The authors mention this in 2.2.1, when discussing the contributions driven by $Z$ boson radiation, but then provide their analysis for the $gg\to ZH$ cross section only, implicitly assuming that the two processes can be finally combined and treated as uncorrelated. I think this can only be an approximation, though presumably good. When scale variations are performed, shouldn't they (in principle) be carried out correlated with the Drell-Yan production mechanism ?

Report

I think the paper fully meets the acceptance criteria and should be published after the point I raised is addressed.

Requested changes

I think some additional comments on the interplay with the Drell-Yan production mechanism and the correlation of uncertainties would be appropriate.

Recommendation

Ask for minor revision

  • validity: high
  • significance: high
  • originality: good
  • clarity: high
  • formatting: excellent
  • grammar: excellent

Author:  Marco Vitti  on 2025-11-20  [id 6051]

(in reply to Report 1 on 2025-10-02)
Category:
answer to question

Dear Editor, dear referee

we thank the referee for carefully reading the manuscript and for the useful comments.

The referee requested a more prominent account of the interplay of the gluon-initated
channel with the Drell-Yan-like contribution. We addressed the request in the following
ways:

• We added a sentence at the end of the Introduction, in which we mention that
the two contributions cannot be formally treated as independent, and referring
to a discussion in Subsection 2.2.

• We added a paragraph at the beginning of Subsection 2.2, where we state (as
correctly pointed out by the referee) that real-emission diagrams that we included
in our O($\alpha_s^3$) corrections can interfere with Drell-Yan-like diagrams at O($\alpha_s^2$ ).

• We added a sentence at the end of Subsection 3.1, stating that our choice of
central scales for the evaluation of the gluon-initiated contribution does not take
into account correlations of scale uncertainties due to the interplay of the gluon-
initiated and Drell-Yan-like channels. However, we assume these effects to be of
higher order. We believe anyways that these effects would need further scrutiny
in the combination of the different channels.

We have submitted a revised version to the arXiv and we hope that, with the above
changes, it can be accepted for publication

Best regards,
Marco Vitti, for the authors

Login to report or comment