NLO QCD corrections to off-shell top-antitop production with leptonic decays in association with a Higgs boson at the LHC

Abstract

Abstract:We compute the hadronic production of top-antitop pairs in association with a Higgs boson at next-to-leading-order QCD, including the decay of the top and antitop quark into bottom quarks and leptons. Our computation is based on full leading and next-to-leading-order matrix elements for e + ν e µ −ν µ bbH(j) and includes all non-resonant contributions, off-shell effects and interferences. Numerical results for the integrated cross section and several differential distributions are given for the LHC operating at 13 TeV using a fixed and a dynamical factorization and renormalization scale. The use of the dynamical instead of the fixed scale improves the perturbative stability in high-energy tails of most distributions, while the integrated cross section is hardly affected differing by only about one per cent and leading to almost the same K factor of about 1.17.

NNLO QCD predictions for fully-differential top-quark pair production at the Tevatron

“…We should also mention the most recent calculations of this type, where off-shell effects could even be included in associated production [26,27]. As far as NNLO corrections are concerned, it should be possible to work in the Narrow Width Approximation as done at NLO in [28][29][30][31].…”

RECOLA2: REcursive Computation of One-Loop Amplitudes 2

“…[16]. It has successfully applied for the calculation of EW corrections to the processes pp → 2ℓ+≤2j [33] and pp → µ + µ − e + e − [34], and for the calculation of QCD corrections to the process pp → WWbbH [35].…”

Associated production of a top pair and a Higgs boson beyond NLO

“…The NLO QCD and electroweak corrections have been included in the POWHEG BOX framework [12]. Recently, a study of ttH production going beyond stable top quarks was presented in [13], where differential cross sections have been computed, including the decay of the top quarks as well as off-shell effects. Finally, the soft gluon emission corrections to the total ttH cross section in the production threshold limit, where the partonic center-of-mass energy approaches 2m t +m H , were evaluated up next-to-leading logarithmic (NLL) accuracy, and they were matched to NLO calculations [14].…”