Bottom-quark-induced processes are responsible for a large fraction of the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) discovery potential, in particular, for supersymmetric Higgs bosons. Recently, the discrepancy between exclusive and inclusive Higgs boson production rates has been linked to the choice of an appropriate bottom factorization scale. We investigate the process kinematics at hadron colliders and show that it leads to a considerable decrease in the bottom factorization scale. This effect is the missing piece needed to understand the corresponding higher order results. Our results hold generally for charged and for neutral Higgs boson production at the LHC as well as at the Fermilab Tevatron. The situation is different for single top quark production, where we find no sizable suppression of the factorization scale. Turning the argument around, we can specify how large are the collinear logarithms that can be resummed using the bottom parton picture.

• Received 16 May 2003

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.69.094005