Heavy Higgs boson resonances and their decay into top quarks at the LHC

Abstract

We investigate, within the type-II two-Higgs-doublet extension of the standard model (SM), the impact of heavy neutral Higgs boson resonances with unsuppressed Yukawa couplings to top quarks on top-quark pair production at the LHC at next-to-leading order (NLO) in the strong coupling constant. We take into account the resonant Higgs boson contributions, the non-resonant SM $t\bar{t}$ continuum and the interference of these two contributions. The NLO QCD corrections to heavy Higgs production and the interference contributions are calculated in the large top-quark mass ($m_t$) limit, including an effective K-factor rescaling. Our evaluation of the QCD-Higgs interference is focused on the Higgs resonance region. Using representative CP-conserving as well as CP-violating parameter scenarios phenomenological results are presented for different observables.

Comments: 10 pages, 4 figures, contribution to the proceedings of the Fourth Annual Large Hadron Collider Physics conference, 13-18 June 2016, Lund, Sweden