$W^+W^-H$ production through bottom quarks fusion at hadron colliders

TL;DR

This paper investigates the production of WWH via bottom quark fusion at hadron colliders, emphasizing the importance of W boson polarization and QCD corrections to probe the WWHH coupling and electroweak symmetry breaking.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed calculation of one-loop QCD corrections for polarized W boson final states in WWH production through bottom quark fusion, highlighting the role of polarization in coupling measurements.

Findings

Large QCD corrections for longitudinal W bosons

W boson polarization measurement can probe WWHH coupling

Varying WWHH coupling affects production rates

Abstract

With the standard model working well in describing the collider data, the focus is now on determining the standard model parameters as well as for any hint of deviation. In particular, the determination of the couplings of the Higgs boson with itself and with other particles of the model is important to better understand the electroweak symmetry breaking sector of the model. In this letter, we look at the process $pp \to WWH$, in particular through the fusion of bottom quarks. Due to the non-negligible coupling of the Higgs boson with the bottom quarks, there is a dependence on the $WWHH$ coupling in this process. This sub-process receives largest contribution when the $W$ bosons are longitudinally polarized. We compute one-loop QCD corrections to various final states with polarized $W$ bosons. We find that the corrections to the final state with the longitudinally polarized $W$ bosons are large. It is shown that the measurement of the polarization of the $W$ bosons can be used as a tool to probe the $WWHH$ coupling in this process. We also examine the effect of varying $WWHH$ coupling in the $\kappa$-framework.