Higgs-Pair Production via Gluon Fusion: Top-Yukawa- and light-quark-induced electroweak Corrections

TL;DR

This paper calculates the complete electroweak corrections to Higgs-pair production via gluon fusion at the LHC, including top-Yukawa and light-quark effects, to improve theoretical precision.

Contribution

It provides the first full next-to-leading order electroweak correction calculation for gluon fusion Higgs-pair production, including light-quark contributions.

Findings

Electroweak corrections moderately modify the cross section.

Corrections are relevant for high-precision measurements at HL--LHC.

Improves theoretical uncertainty estimates for Higgs-pair production.

Abstract

Gluon fusion, $gg\to HH$, is the dominant Higgs-pair production process at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and provides the first direct access to the trilinear Higgs self-interaction. The process is loop-induced, with the main contribution emerging from top-quark loops within the Standard Model. In the past, the QCD corrections have been calculated and found to increase the cross section significantly. With the anticipated accuracies achievable at the high-luminosity LHC (HL--LHC), the theoretical uncertainties will be of increased relevance to compete with the experimental precision at the level of less than 30\%. In this work, we take the next steps towards the determination of the complete electroweak corrections at next-to-leading order by calculating the full top-Yukawa and light-quark induced corrections. These corrections modify the cross section moderately in the kinematical regimes of interest.