Associated $Z^0H^0$ production with leptonic decays at LHC in next-to-leading order QCD

TL;DR

This paper studies the impact of the littlest Higgs model on Z^0H^0 production at the LHC, showing significant deviations from the Standard Model and highlighting the importance of NLO QCD corrections for precision measurements.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of LHM effects on Z^0H^0 production including NLO QCD corrections and explores their dependence on model parameters.

Findings

Heavy neutral gauge bosons induce ~12% deviation at 14 TeV.

NLO QCD corrections reduce scale uncertainty.

Differential cross sections are significantly enhanced.

Abstract

In this work we investigate the effects of the littlest Higgs model (LHM) up to the QCD next-to-leading order (NLO) on the $Z^0H^0$ associated production at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). We study the dependences of the leading order and NLO QCD corrected integrated cross sections for this process on the factorization/renormalization scale and the LHM parameters. We also provide the distributions of the transverse momenta of final decay products $\mu^-$ and $\tau^-$. Our results show that the heavy neutral gauge bosons $Z_H$ and $A_H$ could induce significant discrepancies from the standard model predictions. It is found that when the LHM parameters are taken as $c=0.5$, $c^{\prime}=0.22$, $f=4 TeV$ and $\mu=(M_H+M_Z)/2$, the effects at the $\sqrt{s}=14 TeV$ LHC from the heavy neutral gauge boson are about 12.83% and 10.37% to the leading order and NLO QCD corrected integrated cross sections, respectively. We also conclude that the NLO QCD corrections at the $\sqrt{s}=14 TeV$ LHC can obviously reduce the scale uncertainty of the integrated cross section, and significantly enhance the differential cross sections of $p_T^{\mu^-}$ and $p_T^{\tau^-}$. It demonstrates that the precision measurement of the $Z^0H^0$ associated production process at the LHC could provide the clue of the LHM physics.