Differential cross section for Higgs boson production including all-orders soft gluon resummation

The transverse momentum Q(T) distribution is computed for inclusive Higgs boson production at the energy of the CERN Large Hadron Collider. We focus on the dominant gluon-gluon subprocess in perturbative quantum chromodynamics and incorporate contributions from the quark-gluon and quark-antiquark channels. Using an impact-parameter b-space formalism, we include all-orders resummation of large logarithms associated with emission of soft gluons. Our resummed results merge smoothly at large Q(T) with the fixed-order expectations in perturbative quantum chromodynamics, as they should, with no need for a matching procedure. They show a high degree of stability with respect to variation of parameters associated with the nonperturbative input at low Q(T). We provide distributions dsigma/dydQ(T) for Higgs boson masses from M-Z to 200 GeV. The average transverse momentum at zero rapidity y grows approximately linearly with mass of the Higgs boson over the range M-Z<m(h)<200 GeV, <Q(T)>similar or equal to0.18m(h)+18 GeV. We provide analogous results for Z boson production, for which we compute <Q(T)>similar or equal to25 GeV. The harder transverse momentum distribution for the Higgs boson arises because there is more soft gluon radiation in Higgs boson production than in Z production.