Soft and virtual corrections to pp -> H+X at next-to-next-to-leading order- art. no. 013015

The contributions of virtual corrections and soft gluon emission to the inc lusive Higgs boson production cross section pp-->H+X are computed at next-t o-next-to-leading order in the heavy top quark limit. We show that this par t of the total cross section is well behaved in the sense of perturbative c onvergence, with the NNLO corrections amounting to an enhancement of the NL O cross section by similar to5% for the CERN LHC and 10-20% for the Fermila b Tevatron. We compare our results with an existing estimate of the full NN LO effects and argue that an analytic evaluation of the hard scattering con tributions is needed.