Higgs Boson Production in Bottom-Quark Fusion to Third Order in the Strong Coupling

We present the inclusive cross section at next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order ((NLO)-L-3) in perturbative QCD for the production of a Higgs boson via bottom-quark fusion. We employ the five-flavor scheme, treating the bottom quark as a massless parton while retaining a nonvanishing Yukawa coupling to the Higgs boson. We find that the dependence of the hadronic cross section on the renormalization and factorization scales is substantially reduced. For judicious choices of the scales the perturbative expansion of the cross section shows a convergent behavior. We present results for the (NLO)-L-3 cross section at various collider energies. In comparison to the cross section obtained from the Santander matching of the four- and five-flavor schemes, we predict a slightly higher cross section, though the two predictions are consistent within theoretical uncertainties.