Mixed scalar-pseudoscalar Higgs boson production through next-to-next-to-leading order at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper calculates the production of a mixed scalar-pseudoscalar Higgs boson at the LHC at NNLO in QCD, including decay channels and interference effects, providing detailed distributions sensitive to the Higgs parity.

Contribution

It provides the first fully differential NNLO QCD predictions for mixed scalar-pseudoscalar Higgs production with decay, including interference effects and parity-sensitive distributions.

Findings

NNLO QCD corrections significantly affect kinematic distributions.

Interference between scalar and pseudoscalar states impacts observable shapes.

Differential distributions reveal parity-sensitive features of the Higgs boson.

Abstract

We study the production of a mixed scalar-pseudoscalar Higgs boson in gluon fusion at the LHC, through next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in QCD. We obtain fully differential results, including the decay of the Higgs boson to two charged lepton pairs. We discuss the impact of the interference between the scalar and pseudoscalar states. We also show differential distributions for several kinematic variables whose shape is sensitive to the parity of the Higgs boson, and assess the impact of the NNLO QCD corrections on these shapes.