Heavy Higgs boson production and decay into top quarks at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper calculates next-to-leading order QCD corrections for heavy Higgs boson production and decay into top quarks at the LHC, including interference effects and spin observables within the 2HDM framework.

Contribution

It provides the first NLO QCD correction calculations for heavy Higgs production and decay into top pairs, incorporating interference and spin effects in the 2HDM.

Findings

NLO corrections significantly affect Higgs-top quark production rates.

Interference between Higgs signal and SM background is evaluated in the resonance region.

Results include distributions and spin-dependent observables for different 2HDM scenarios.

Abstract

In this contribution we report on the calculation of the next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD corrections to the hadro-production of heavy neutral Higgs bosons and their decay into top-quark pairs within the type-II two-Higgs-doublet extension of the standard model (SM). We take into account the contributions from resonant Higgs boson production, the non-resonant SM $t\bar{t}$ background as well as the interference of these two contributions. The NLO corrections to the signal and interference contributions are calculated by applying the heavy top-quark mass ($m_t$) limit including an effective rescaling. In our NLO calculation the QCD-Higgs interference is evaluated in the resonance region that provides the dominant part of the heavy Higgs-boson contributions. Evaluating representative $CP$-conserving and $CP$-violating parameter scenarios within the two-Higgs-doublet model (2HDM) we present results for different distributions and, in addition, for observables that depend on the top-quark spin.