Higgs production in association with bottom quarks

TL;DR

This work delivers the first NLO+PS predictions for Higgs production in association with bottom quarks in both the four-flavour and five-flavour schemes, enabling fully differential, showered predictions at 13 TeV. It systematically compares 4FS and 5FS, detailing scheme-specific treatments of the bottom Yukawa and including O(αs^3) interference with gluon-fusion, as well as cross-checks against analytic NNLO+NNLL resummation for the Higgs p_T. The study highlights how mass effects (4FS) and resummation (5FS) influence exclusive observables and provides guidance on the expected agreement between schemes in different kinematic regimes. These results enhance precision in bottom Yukawa coupling studies and inform experimental analyses at the LHC, especially for measurements relying on b-tagged final states and Higgs kinematics.

Abstract

We study the production of a Higgs boson in association with bottom quarks in hadronic collisions, and present phenomenological predictions relevant to the 13 TeV LHC. Our results are accurate to the next-to-leading order in QCD, and matched to parton showers through the MC@NLO method; thus, they are fully differential and based on unweighted events, which we shower by using both Herwig++ and Pythia8. We perform the computation in both the four-flavour and the five-flavour schemes, whose results we compare extensively at the level of exclusive observables. In the case of the Higgs transverse momentum, we also consider the analytically-resummed cross section up to the NNLO+NNLL accuracy. In addition, we analyse at ${\cal O}(α_S^3)$ the effects of the interference between the $b\bar{b}H$ and gluon-fusion production modes.

Figures (5)

• Figure 1: Sample of LO Feynman diagrams for $b\bar{b}H$ production in the four-flavour scheme, for the two relevant classes of partonic subprocesses: (a) $gg\rightarrow b\bar{b}H$; (b) $q\bar{q}\rightarrow b\bar{b}H$.
• Figure 2: Sample of one-loop Feynman diagrams for $b\bar{b}H$ production in the four-flavour scheme. All diagrams contribute to the $y_b^2$ term when the Higgs is radiated off a bottom quark, while diagrams (a), (b), and (e) with a top-quark loop contribute to the $y_by_t$ term.
• Figure 3: Sample of real-emission Feynman diagrams for $b\bar{b}H$ production in the four-flavour scheme.
• Figure 4: A sample of Feynman diagrams for $b\bar{b}H{}$ production in the five-flavour scheme: (a) LO; (b) one-loop; (c-d) real emission.
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