Higgs production in hadron collisions: soft and virtual QCD corrections at NNLO

We consider QCD corrections to Higgs boson production through gluon–gluon fusion in hadron collisions. Using the recently evaluated [14]two-loop amplitude for this process and the corresponding factorization formulae [15, 16, 17, 18] describing soft-gluon bremsstrahlung at O(α2 S), we compute the soft and virtual contributions to the next-to-next-to-leading order cross section. We also discuss soft-gluon resummation at next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy. Numerical results for Higgs boson production at the LHC are presented.