Top-associated Higgs-boson production using perturbative fragmentation functions at next-to-leading-order

Journal of High Energy Physics, vol. 2026

Abstract

A bstract Under certain conditions, the production of a Higgs boson in association with a top-anti-top pair at hadron colliders can be described via a factorisation theorem using perturbative fragmentation functions. The latter describe the nearly collinear emission of a Higgs boson from a top-quark and reproduce the leading mass dependence of the exact next-to-leading-order (NLO) calculation. Although the NLO fragmentation functions have been calculated a few years ago, it has not been possible up to now to demonstrate the applicability of the approximation in a realistic setup. At NLO, we analyse two different ways of treating the top-quark mass, called the zero-mass-top-quark (ZMTQ) and the hybrid prescription. We show that the method yields reliable results at LHC center-of-mass (cms) energies in the hybrid prescription. In the ZMTQ prescription, the results at LHC cms energies are only reliable in the quark-anti-quark channel, but become viable for the full $$ pp\to t\overline{t}H $$ pp → t t ¯ H process at a 100 TeV hadron collider. In addition, we discuss some subtleties and complications arising when extending the formalism to next-to-next-to-leading-order (NNLO) and beyond.

Authors 4

1. Colomba Brancaccio

   Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Torino · University of Turin

   Affiliation as printed

   Università di Torino, and INFN, Sezione di Torino

2. Michał Czakon Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University

3. Terry Generet

   University of Cambridge

   Affiliation as printed

   University of Cambridge

4. Benedikt Gurdon corresponding Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University