NLO QCD Corrections to Higgs Pair Production including Dimension-6 Operators

TL;DR

This paper calculates NLO QCD corrections to Higgs pair production considering dimension-6 operators, showing that new physics effects can significantly alter cross sections and correction factors.

Contribution

It provides the first NLO QCD correction calculations for Higgs pair production including dimension-6 operators in the large top mass limit.

Findings

NLO corrections can change the cross section by up to an order of magnitude.

Dimension-6 operators affect NLO corrections by several percent.

The results enable more accurate predictions for Higgs pair production in new physics scenarios.

Abstract

New Physics that becomes relevant at some high scale $\Lambda$ beyond the experimental reach, can be described in the effective theory approach by adding higher-dimensional operators to the Standard Model (SM) Lagrangian. In Higgs pair production through gluon fusion, which gives access to the trilinear Higgs self-coupling, this leads not only to modifications of the SM couplings but also induces novel couplings not present in the SM. For a proper prediction of the cross section, higher order QCD corrections that are important for this process, have to be taken into account. The various higher-dimensional contributions are affected differently by the QCD corrections. In this paper, we provide the next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD corrections to Higgs pair production including dimension-6 operators in the limit of large top quark masses. Depending on the dimension-6 coefficients entering the Lagrangian, the new operators affect the relative NLO QCD corrections by several per cent, while modifying the cross section by up to an order of magnitude.