Speaker
Description
We present a new simulation for Higgs boson production in association with bottom quarks ($bbH$) at next-to-leading order (NLO) matched to parton showers. The contributions proportional to the bottom-quark Yukawa coupling and top-quark Yukawa coupling (from gluon fusion) are both taken into account in a scheme with massive bottom quarks. The $bbH$ process constitutes a crucial background to measurements of Higgs-boson pair ($HH$) production at the LHC when at least one of the Higgs bosons decays to bottom quarks. So far, the modeling of $bbH$ induced one of the dominant theoretical uncertainties to $HH$ measurements, as the gluon-fusion component was described only at the leading order with uncertainties of O(100%). Including NLO corrections allows to reduce the scale dependence to O(50%). We provide an in-depth analysis of the $bbH$ background to $HH$ measurements and we propagate the effect of the new $bbH$ simulation to $HH$ searches in the $2b2\gamma$ and $2b2\tau$ final states.
