Single top and Higgs associated production at the LHC

Abstract

We study the production of a Standard Model (SM) Higgs boson in association with a single top quark and either a light jet or $W$-boson at the LHC with a center of mass energy of 14 TeV. Due to the destructive interference of the contributing SM diagrams, the value of the top Yukawa coupling and the sign of the $WWh$ coupling may be probed for Higgs masses above 150 GeV where $WW$ and $ZZ$ are the dominant Higgs decays. We consider Higgs masses of $m_h=120$, 150, 180, and 200 GeV and devise experimental cuts to extract the signal from SM backgrounds and measure the top Yukawa coupling.

Comments: 21 pages, 7 figures, 7 tables