Electroweak and Bottom Quark Contributions to Higgs Boson plus Jet Production

This paper presents predictions for jet pseudorapidity (eta) and transverse momentum (p_T) distributions for the production of the Standard Model Higgs boson in association with a high-p_T hadronic jet. We discuss the contributions of electroweak loops and of bottom-quark parton processes to the cross section. The latter arise in the five-flavour scheme. Predictions for the Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider with 10 TeV collision energy are presented. For Higgs boson masses of 120 GeV, 160 GeV and 200 GeV, we find the maximal effects of the electroweak contributions to the Higgs plus jet p_T and eta distribution to be -14 % and -5.3 %, respectively, for the Tevatron, and -3 % and -2 %, respectively, for the LHC. For the maximal contribution of bottom-quark parton processes to the p_T and eta distribution, we find +3 % and + 2.5 %, respectively, for the Tevatron, and +3.5 % and +3 %, respectively, for the LHC. A separate study of the Higgs + b-jet cross section demonstrates that a calculational approach which respects the hierarchies of Yukawa couplings yields a leading order cross section prediction which is more accurate in the high-p_T regime than conventional approaches.