Higgs boson production in association with top quarks in the POWHEG BOX

Abstract

We present results from the analytic calculation of top+antitop+Higgs hadronic production at Next-to-Leading Order in QCD interfaced with parton-shower Monte Carlo event generators in the POWHEG BOX framework. We consider kinematic distributions of the top quark and Higgs boson at the 8 TeV Large Hadron Collider and study the theoretical uncertainties due to specific choices of renormalization/factorization scales and parton-showering algorithms, namely PYTHIA and HERWIG. The importance of spin-correlations in the production and decay stages of a top/antitop quark is discussed on the example of kinematic distributions of leptons originating from the top/antitop decays. The corresponding code is now part of the public release of the POWHEG BOX.

Comments: 15 pp, 14 figures