Electroweak and finite quark-mass effects on the Higgs boson transverse momentum distribution

We perform a detailed study of the various one-loop contributions leading to production of the standard model Higgs boson in association with a hard jet. This production mode contributes to the current Tevatron exclusion limit of the standard model Higgs with 160GeV≤MH≤170GeV, and will also be important for discovery and interpretation of new scalar bosons at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). We include top- and bottom-quark initiated contributions, maintaining the exact dependence on the quark masses, and also study previously neglected W- and Z-boson mediated effects which shift the qg and qq̄ production modes. We consider the deviations from commonly used approximations for the Higgs boson transverse momentum spectrum caused by the finite top-quark mass, bottom-quark contributions, and electroweak gauge boson terms. All three effects act to decrease the Higgs boson transverse momentum distribution for observable momenta, with shifts reaching -8% at the Tevatron and -30% at the LHC. The shifts have a significant dependence on the Higgs pT, and are especially important if large momenta are selected by experimental cuts.