Fully exclusive heavy quark-antiquark pair production from a colourless initial state at NNLO in QCD

Abstract

Abstract We present a local subtraction scheme for computing next-to-next-to-leading order QCD corrections to the production of a massive quark-antiquark pair from a colourless initial state. The subtraction terms are built following the CoLoRFulNNLO method and refined in such a way that their integration gives rise to compact, fully analytic expressions. All ingredients necessary for a numerical implementation of our subtraction scheme are provided in detail. As an example, we calculate the fully differential decay rate of the Standard Model Higgs boson to massive bottom quarks at next-to-next-to-leading order accuracy in perturbative QCD.