In case you haven't noticed, there is a new paper in the arxiv which you should not ignore if you are doing Higgs physics at the LHC. Of course, most of you are not involved in this, but still, it may feel good to know that there has recently been a collective effort of experimentalists and theorists to put together detailed and precise predictions for the Higgs boson production rate, in a way that can be easily used by the experiments.
The article is titled "Handbook of LHC Higgs Cross Sections - 1. Inclusive Observables". It is a hefty 150 pages document, which contains a lot of information on the phenomenology of the standard model Higgs boson in proton-proton collisions. I will confess I have not yet started to dicest its contents, however I know something about it because I took part in the first "organizational" meeting of the working group, a little more than a year ago in Turin. For once, I can boast about having had the guts of withdrawing from a clearly ambitious and worthy project, rather than trying to sit through its proceedings trying to look busy and get my name on the resulting publications. I simply realized I had no time to invest, nor any competence to offer to an already skilled group of physicists.
Being unable to comment on the contents (you should be aware that I am on vacation - skiing in the Slovenian slopes, until the 8th of January), I will comment on the abstract, which reads as follows:
This Report summarizes the results of the first 10 months' activities of the
LHC Higgs Cross Sections Working Group. The main goal of the working group was
to present the status-of-art on Higgs Physics at the LHC integrating all new
results that have appeared in the last few years. The Report is more than a
mere collection of the proceedings of the general meetings. The subgroups have
been working in different directions. An attempt has been made to present the
first Report from these subgroups in a complete and homogeneous form. The
subgroups' contributions correspondingly comprise the main parts of the Report.
A significant amount of work has been performed in providing higher-order
corrections to the Higgs-boson cross sections and pinning down the theoretical
uncertainty of the Standard Model predictions. This Report comprises explicit
numerical results on total cross sections, leaving the issues of event
selection cuts and differential distributions to future publications. The
subjects for further study are identified.
Now, despite the author list contains several friends, I will not abstain from a little criticism here. This is one of the least interesting abstracts I have happened to read in many years of so-so career. It seems focused on the working group itself rather than on the results that the paper is supposed to provide to the reader.
Despite this little blemish, I know for a fact that this report is going to generate a large number of citations and will become a reference for future studies of Higgs boson physics at the Large Hadron Collider. So in earnest I can only say, well done folks!
