Heavy charged Higgs boson production at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper provides the first fully-differential NLO QCD predictions for heavy charged Higgs boson production with heavy quarks at the LHC, comparing four- and five-flavour schemes and offering recommendations for experimental simulations.

Contribution

It introduces the first fully-differential NLO results in the four-flavour scheme for charged Higgs production, with detailed comparisons to the five-flavour scheme and practical simulation guidance.

Findings

NLO(+PS) corrections improve scheme agreement for inclusive observables.

Four-flavour scheme offers more reliable bottom-quark kinematics predictions.

The study provides detailed recommendations for LHC experimental analyses.

Abstract

In this paper we study the production of a heavy charged Higgs boson in association with heavy quarks at the LHC, in a type-II two-Higgs-doublet model. We present for the first time fully-differential results obtained in the four-flavour scheme at NLO accuracy, both at fixed order and including the matching with parton showers. Relevant differential distributions are studied for two values of the charged boson mass and a thorough comparison is performed between predictions obtained in the four- and five-flavour schemes. We show that the agreement between the two schemes is improved by NLO(+PS) corrections for observables inclusive in the degrees of freedom of bottom quarks. We argue that the four-flavour scheme leads to more reliable predictions, thanks to its accurate description of the bottom-quark kinematics and its small dependence on the Monte Carlos, which in turn is rather large in the five-flavour scheme. A detailed set of recommendations for the simulation of this process in experimental analyses at the LHC is provided.