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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 77: Higgs Physics VIII

T 77.5: Talk

Thursday, March 19, 2026, 17:15–17:30, KH 02.013

Higgs-to-Bottom Decays at next-to-leading order in the Sherpa Event Generator — •Lea Baumann¹, Frank Siegert¹, Mareen Hoppe¹, and Marek Schönherr² — ¹TUD Dresden University of Technology, Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics — ²University of Durham, Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology

Monte Carlo event generators play a central role in particle collider data analysis by providing accurate theoretical predictions of complex scattering processes. Event generators like Sherpa use the narrow-width approximation to describe short-lived resonances as on-shell particles, allowing the factorisation of production and decay of these "hard" particles.

Until now, Sherpa's hard decays have been implemented only at leading order in perturbative quantum chromodynamics (QCD). In this talk, the next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD calculation for the decay of a Higgs boson into a bottom-antibottom pair within the hard-decay framework will be presented. The computation includes the evaluation of virtual loop corrections, real-emission contributions, and the cancellation of infrared singularities using subtraction terms. The resulting NLO matrix element can later be matched to parton shower programmes. This NLO implementation improves the precision of Higgs-decay simulations within Sherpa and enables more accurate modelling of processes.

Keywords: Sherpa event generator; NLO; Hard Decays; QCD