New physics in double Higgs production at NLO

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive NLO calculation of double Higgs production including new physics effects, aiming to improve constraints on Higgs self-coupling and effective couplings at future colliders.

Contribution

It provides the first full loop NLO calculation for SM and new physics effects in double Higgs production, including previously neglected diagrams, and analyzes their impact on collider constraints.

Findings

NLO corrections reduce degeneracy in Higgs coupling measurements.

Differential cross-section analysis improves sensitivity to new physics.

Constraints on effective Higgs couplings are tighter with full NLO and kinematic information.

Abstract

After observing the Higgs boson by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC, accurate measurements of its properties, which allow us to study the electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism, become a high priority for particle physics. The most promising of extracting the Higgs self-coupling at hadron colliders is by examining the double Higgs production, especially in the $b \bar{b} \gamma \gamma$ channel. In this work, we presented full loop calculation for both SM and New Physics effects of the Higgs pair production to next-to-leading-order (NLO), including loop-induced processes $gg\to HH$, $gg\to HHg$, and $qg \to qHH$. We also included the calculation of the corrections from diagrams with only one QCD coupling in $qg \to qHH$, which was neglected in the previous studies. With the latest observed limit on the HH production cross-section, we studied the constraints on the effective Higgs couplings for the LHC at center-of-mass energies of 14 TeV and a provisional 100 TeV proton collider within the Future-Circular-Collider (FCC) project. To obtain results better than using total cross-section alone, we focused on the $b \bar{b} \gamma \gamma$ channel and divided the differential cross-section into low and high bins based on the total invariant mass and $p_{T}$ spectra. The new physics effects are further constrained by including extra kinematic information. However, some degeneracy persists, as shown in previous studies, especially in determining the Higgs trilinear coupling. Our analysis shows that the degeneracy is reduced by including the full NLO corrections.