Single top and Higgs associated production at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper investigates the production of a Higgs boson with a single top quark at the LHC to probe the top Yukawa coupling and the WWh coupling sign, especially for Higgs masses above 150 GeV, using specific experimental cuts.

Contribution

It introduces a method to measure the top Yukawa coupling and WWh coupling sign through associated production processes at 14 TeV LHC, considering various Higgs masses.

Findings

Proposed experimental cuts to extract the signal from backgrounds.

Sensitivity to the top Yukawa coupling and WWh coupling sign.

Feasibility of probing couplings for Higgs masses above 150 GeV.

Abstract

We study the production of a Standard Model (SM) Higgs boson in association with a single top quark and either a light jet or $W$-boson at the LHC with a center of mass energy of 14 TeV. Due to the destructive interference of the contributing SM diagrams, the value of the top Yukawa coupling and the sign of the $WWh$ coupling may be probed for Higgs masses above 150 GeV where $WW$ and $ZZ$ are the dominant Higgs decays. We consider Higgs masses of $m_{h}=120$, 150, 180, and 200 GeV and devise experimental cuts to extract the signal from SM backgrounds and measure the top Yukawa coupling.