Charged Higgs Pairs at the LHC: A NLO Analysis

Abstract

Charged Higgs-boson pair production at hadron colliders yields information about the trilinear couplings involving charged Higgs fields in extensions of the Standard Model (SM). We consider the type-I two-Higgs doublet model (2HDM) extension and obtain next-to-leading order QCD predictions for the charged-Higgs pair production ($H^{+}{H}^{-}$ production). All production modes, i.e. Drell--Yan-like production, gluon fusion and vector-boson fusion are included in the analysis. We determine uncertainties originating from the scale dependence, the parton-density functions and strong coupling ${\alpha }_s$ at the LHC. We observe that the QCD corrections lead to a significant reduction of the relative scale dependences. These improved predictions will allow for a quantitative interpretation of experimental measurements, in case that charged Higgs states will be observed.

Comments: 28 pages, 18 figures, contribution to Report 5 of the LHCHWG, extended discussion based on SciPost referee feedback