Probing the trilinear Higgs boson self-coupling via single Higgs production at the LHeC

Abstract

The determination of the Higgs self-coupling is one of the key ingredients for understanding the mechanism behind the electroweak symmetry breaking. An indirect method for constraining the Higgs trilinear self-coupling via single Higgs production at next-to-leading order (NLO) has been proposed in order to avoid the drawbacks of studies with double Higgs production. In this paper we study the Higgs self-interaction through the vector boson fusion (VBF) process e-p→νehj at the future LHeC. At NLO level, we compute analytically the scattering amplitudes for relevant processes, in particular those induced by the Higgs self-interaction. A Monte Carlo simulation and a statistical analysis utilizing the analytic results are then carried out for Higgs production through VBF and decay to bb, which yield for the trilinear Higgs self-coupling rescaling parameter κλ the limit [-0.57, 2.98] with 2 ab-1 integrated luminosity. If we assume about 10% of the signal survives the event selection cuts, and include all the background, the constraint will be broadened to [-2.11, 4.63].