Top-Yukawa contributions to bbH production at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the production of a Higgs boson with bottom quarks at the LHC, highlighting the significance of top-quark Yukawa contributions and proposing ways to distinguish different production mechanisms.

Contribution

It provides a next-to-leading order QCD analysis of $b\bar{b}H$ production including top-quark effects, identifying key observables for experimental separation.

Findings

NLO corrections to $y_t^2$ are large, nearly doubling the rate.

Top-quark contributions dominate in the Standard Model.

Specific distributions and cuts can enhance sensitivity to the bottom-quark Yukawa coupling.

Abstract

We study the production of a Higgs boson in association with bottom quarks ($b\bar{b}H$) in hadronic collisions at the LHC, including the different contributions stemming from terms proportional to the top-quark Yukawa coupling ($y_t^2$), to the bottom-quark one ($y_b^2$), and to their interference ($y_b y_t$). Our results are accurate to next-to-leading order in QCD, employ the four-flavour scheme and the (Born-improved) heavy-top quark approximation. We find that next-to-leading order corrections to the $y_t^2$ component are sizable, making it the dominant production mechanism for associated $b\bar{b}H$ production in the Standard Model and increasing its inclusive rate by almost a factor of two. By studying final-state distributions of the various contributions, we identify observables and selection cuts that can be used to select the various components and to improve the experimental sensitivity of $b\bar{b}H$ production on the bottom-quark Yukawa coupling.