Approximate $\mathrm{N^{3}LO}$ Higgs-boson production cross section using physical-kernel constraints

The single-logarithmic enhancement of the physical kernel for Higgs production by gluon-gluon fusion in the heavy top-quark limit is employed to derive the leading so far unknown contributions, ln^{5,4,3}(1-z), to the N^3LO coefficient function in the threshold expansion. Also using knowledge from Higgs-exchange DIS to estimate the remaining terms not vanishing for z = m_H^2/s^hat -> 1, these results are combined with the recently completed soft + virtual contributions to provide an uncertainty band for the complete N^3LO correction. For the 2008 MSTW parton distributions these N^3LO contributions increase the cross section at 14 TeV by (10 +- 2)% and (3 +- 2.5)% for the standard choices mu_R = m_H and mu_R = m_H/2 of the renormalization scale. The remaining uncertainty arising from the hard-scattering cross sections can be quantified as no more than 5%, which is smaller than that due to the strong coupling and the parton distributions.The single-logarithmic enhancement of the physical kernel for Higgs production by gluon-gluon fusion in the heavy top-quark limit is employed to derive the leading so far unknown contributions, ln$^{5, 4, 3}$(1−z), to the N$^{3}$LO coefficient function in the threshold expansion. Also using knowledge from Higgs-exchange DIS to estimate the remaining terms not vanishing for z = m$_{H}^{2}$ /ŝ → 1, these results are combined with the recently completed soft + virtual contributions to provide an uncertainty band for the complete N$^{3}$LO correction. For the 2008 MSTW parton distributions these N$^{3}$LO contributions increase the cross section at 14 TeV by (10 ±2)% and (3 ±2.5)% for the standard choices μ$_{R}$ = m$_{H}$ and μ$_{R}$ = m$_{H}$ /2 of the renormalization scale. The remaining uncertainty arising from the hard-scattering cross sections can be quantified as no more than 5%, which is smaller than that due to the strong coupling and the parton distributions.