Higgs Boson plus Quark Pair Production at High Energies as di-Higgs Background

Abstract

We investigate the impact of high-energy QCD resummation on Higgs-boson production processes relevant for Higgs-pair studies at the Large Hadron Collider. We present the first dedicated study of Higgs boson production in association with a bottom-quark pair and two additional hard jets in the gluon-fusion channel at high energies as a background to vector-boson-fusion Higgs-pair production. The resummation can significantly modify the QCD contribution in VBF-like regions of phase space, indicating that fixed-order calculations overestimate the contamination from gluon-fusion backgrounds. We then extend existing High Energy Jets (HEJ) predictions for Higgs boson production in association with jets by including quark-pair resummation effects for the first time.