Higgs production in association with a single top quark at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive NLO QCD analysis of Higgs production with a single top quark at the LHC, including cross sections, uncertainties, scheme comparisons, and sensitivity to non-standard couplings.

Contribution

It offers the first detailed NLO predictions for both t-channel and s-channel Higgs + top production, including scheme comparisons and coupling phase sensitivity.

Findings

Predictions for 13 TeV LHC with uncertainty estimates.

Comparison between 4-flavour and 5-flavour schemes.

Sensitivity analysis to non-standard Higgs-top coupling phases.

Abstract

We present a detailed study of Higgs boson production in association with a single top quark at the LHC, at next-to-leading order accuracy in QCD. We consider total and differential cross sections, at the parton level as well as by matching short distance events to parton showers, for both t-channel and s-channel production. We provide predictions relevant for the LHC at 13 TeV together with a thorough evaluation of the residual uncertainties coming from scale variation, parton distributions, strong coupling constant and heavy quark masses. In addition, for t-channel production, we compare results as obtained in the 4-flavour and 5-flavour schemes, pinning down the most relevant differences between them. Finally, we study the sensitivity to a non-standard-model relative phase between the Higgs couplings to the top quark and to the weak bosons.