Higgs production in bottom quark fusion: matching the 4- and 5-flavour schemes to third order in the strong coupling

A bstract We present analytic results for the partonic cross sections for the production of a Higgs boson via the fusion of two bottom quarks at N 3 LO in QCD perturbation theory in the five-flavour scheme. We combine this perturbative result with NLO accurate predictions in the four-flavour scheme that include the full bottom quark mass dependence by appropriately removing any double-counting stemming from contributions included in both predictions. We thereby obtain state-of-the-art predictions for the inclusive production probability of a Higgs boson via bottom quark fusion at hadron colliders.