Two-loop leading-colour QCD helicity amplitudes for Higgs boson production in association with a bottom-quark pair at the LHC

We compute the two-loop QCD helicity amplitudes for the production of a Higgs boson in association with a bottom quark pair at a hadron collider. We take the approximations of leading colour and work in the five flavour scheme, where the bottom quarks are massless while the Yukawa coupling is non-zero. We extract analytic expressions from multiple numerical evaluations over finite fields and present the results in terms of an independent set of special functions that can be reliably evaluated over the full phase space.

Search for charged Higgs bosons decaying into a top quark and a bottom quark at $$ \sqrt{\mathrm{s}} $$ = 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector

A search for charged Higgs bosons decaying into a top quark and a bottom quark is presented. The data analysed correspond to 139 fb−1 of proton-proton collisions at $$ \sqrt{s} $$ s = 13 TeV, recorded with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. The production of a heavy charged Higgs boson in association with a top quark and a bottom quark, pp → tbH+ → tbtb, is explored in the H+ mass range from 200 to 2000 GeV using final states with jets and one electron or muon. Events are categorised according to the multiplicity of jets and b-tagged jets, and multivariate analysis techniques are used to discriminate between signal and background events. No significant excess above the background-only hypothesis is observed and exclusion limits are derived for the production cross-section times branching ratio of a charged Higgs boson as a function of its mass; they range from 3.6 pb at 200 GeV to 0.036 pb at 2000 GeV at 95% confidence level. The results are interpreted in the hMSSM and $$ {M}_h^{125} $$ M h 125 scenarios.

Bottom-induced contributions to Higgs plus jet at next-to-next-to-leading order

We present a next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) QCD calculation of the bottom-induced contributions to the production of a Higgs boson plus a jet, i.e. the process pp → H + j to $$ \mathcal{O}\left({y}_b^2{\alpha}_s^3\right) $$ O y b 2 α s 3 . We work in the five-flavor scheme (5FS) in which the bottom quark mass is retained only in the coupling to the Higgs boson. Our calculation uses N-jettiness slicing to regulate infrared divergences, allowing for fully-differential predictions for collider observables. After extensively validating the methodology, we present results for the 13 TeV LHC. Our NNLO predictions show a marked improvement in the overall renormalization and factorization scale dependence, the latter of which proves to be particularly troublesome for 5FS calculations at lower orders. In addition, using the same methodology we present a NNLO computation of $$ b\overline{b} $$ b b ¯ → H. Our results are implemented into MCFM.

Bottom-quark production at hadron colliders: fully differential predictions in NNLO QCD

We report on the first fully differential calculation of the next-to-next-to-leading-order (NNLO) QCD radiative corrections to the production of bottom-quark pairs at hadron colliders. The calculation is performed by using the qT subtraction formalism to handle and cancel infrared singularities in real and virtual contributions. The computation is implemented in the Matrix framework, thereby allowing us to efficiently compute arbitrary infrared-safe observables in the four-flavour scheme. We present selected predictions for bottom-quark production at the Tevatron and at the LHC at different collider energies, and we perform some comparisons with available experimental results. We find that the NNLO corrections are sizeable, typically of the order of 25–35%, and they lead to a significant reduction of the perturbative uncertainties. Therefore, their inclusion is crucial for an accurate theoretical description of this process.