Top-Yukawa contributions to bbH production at the LHC

Abstract

We study the production of a Higgs boson in association with bottom quarks (bb¯ H) in hadronic collisions at the LHC, including the different contributions stemming from terms proportional to the top-quark Yukawa coupling (yt2), to the bottom-quark one (yb2), and to their interference (ybyt). Our results are accurate to next-to-leading order in QCD, employ the four-flavour scheme and the (Born-improved) heavy-top quark approximation. We find that next-to-leading order corrections to the yt2 component are sizable, making it the dominant production mechanism for associated bb¯ H production in the Standard Model and increasing its inclusive rate by almost a factor of two. By studying final-state distributions of the various contributions, we identify observables and selection cuts that can be used to select the various components and to improve the experimental sensitivity of bb¯ H production on the bottom-quark Yukawa coupling.