Higgs-Strahlung: Merging the NLO Drell-Yan and Loop-Induced 0+1 jet Multiplicities

TL;DR

This paper improves the theoretical modeling of Higgs boson production with a Z boson at hadron colliders by merging NLO Drell-Yan and loop-induced processes, analyzing the effects of potential non-standard top-Higgs couplings.

Contribution

It introduces advanced multi-jet merging algorithms at NLO for Higgs-Z production, enhancing differential distribution predictions and exploring sensitivity to anomalous top-Higgs interactions.

Findings

Significant corrections to Higgs transverse momentum and invariant mass distributions.

Enhanced modeling accuracy for jet-related observables.

Constraints on non-standard top-Higgs couplings from LHC data.

Abstract

We analyse the production of a Higgs boson in association with a Z boson at hadron colliders in the Standard Model and some simple extensions. We show how multi-jet merging algorithms at leading and next-to-leading order for the loop-induced gluon fusion and the Drell-Yan like quark-induced processes, respectively, improve the descriptions for various differential distributions, in particular those that involve the production of additional jets. The phenomenological studies focus on two relevant channels of Higgs boson decays, namely $H\rightarrow invisible$ and $H\rightarrow b\bar{b}$. We find sizable and phenomenologically relevant corrections to the transverse momentum and invariant mass distributions for the Higgs boson candidate. Thanks to the large destructive interference for the top Yukawa terms, this process is very sensitive to the magnitude and sign of a possible non-standard top-Higgs coupling. We analyse the impact of this anomalous interaction on distributions and estimate constraints from LHC Run II.