Probing the top-Higgs coupling through the secondary lepton distributions in the associated production of the top-quark pair and Higgs boson at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper investigates how anomalous top-Higgs couplings influence secondary lepton distributions in top-quark pair and Higgs boson production at the LHC, considering both gluon-gluon and quark-antiquark mechanisms.

Contribution

It extends previous analyses by including quark-antiquark production mechanisms and explains the insensitivity of unpolarized cross sections to the sign of anomalous couplings.

Findings

Effects of scalar and pseudoscalar couplings are insensitive to their signs.

Quark-antiquark production mechanisms are significant in the analysis.

Secondary lepton distributions can probe top-Higgs couplings.

Abstract

We complement the analysis of the anomalous top-Higgs coupling effects on the secondary lepton distributions in the associated production of the top-quark pair and Higgs boson in proton-proton collisions at the LHC of the former work by one of the present authors by taking into account the quark-antiquark production mechanism. We also present simple arguments which explain why the effects of the scalar and pseudoscalar anomalous couplings on the unpolarized cross section of the process are completely insensitive to the sign of either of them.