Mixed QCD-EW corrections for Higgs boson production at $e^+e^-$ colliders

Since the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider, a future electron-position collider has been proposed for precisely studying its properties. We investigate the production of the Higgs boson at such an $e^+e^-$ collider associated with a $Z$ boson, and calculate for the first time the mixed QCD-electroweak corrections to the total cross sections. We provide an approximate analytic formula for the cross section and show that it reproduces the exact numeric results rather well for collider energies up to 350 GeV. We also provide numeric results for $\sqrt{s}=500$ GeV, where the approximate formula is no longer valid. We find that the $\mathcal{O}(\alpha\alpha_s)$ corrections amount to a 1.3% increase of the cross section for a center-of-mass energy around 240 GeV. This is significantly larger than the expected experimental accuracy and has to be included for extracting the properties of the Higgs boson from the measurements of the cross sections in the future.
Comment: Version published in Phys.Rev.D