426
22. The GSW Gauge Theory of Electroweak Interactions
FIGURE 22.27
Higgs boson production process by ‘gluon fusion’.
FIGURE 22.28
Higgs boson production process by ‘vector boson fusion’.
this process (which is the same for pp and p¯ p colliders) will rise with energy.
√
At the Tevatron with s = 1.96 TeV, the cross section ranges from about
1 pb for m H ⋍ 100 GeV to 0.2 pb for m H ⋍ 200 GeV. At an LHC energy
√
of s = 7 TeV, the cross section is about 25 pb for m H ⋍ 100 GeV and 0.1
√
pb for m H ⋍ 700 GeV, rising to about 70 pb and 1 pb respectively at s =
14 TeV (Dittmaier et al. 2011). These numbers include QCD corrections,
which increase the parton-level cross sections by a factor of about 2.
The next largest cross sections, some ten times smaller than the gluon
fusion process, are for Higgs production via ‘vector boson fusion’ (qq
′
→ qq
′ H,
see figure 22.28) and for associated production of a Higgs boson with a vector
boson (q¯ q → WH, ZH, see figure 22.29).
These processes involve the trilinear Higgs couplings to the vector bosons,
which are proportional to their masses (see appendix Q). At the LHC, the first
of these cross sections is somewhat larger than the second for m H < 130 GeV,