NLO QCD predictions for hadronic Higgs production with heavy quarks

by Doreen Wackeroth (State University of New York at Buffalo)

Friday 28 May 2004, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Zurich

TH Auditorium (CERN)

One of the most important problems of particle physics is to uncover the origin of the electroweak symmetry breaking. We know from direct searches at LEP2 and electroweak precision data that a Higgs boson should lie in a mass region which will certainly be explored at either the Fermilab Tevatron collider or at the CERN LHC. Among the subleading Higgs production modes, the associated production with top quark pairs can play a crucial role, in particular in a direct measurement of the top Yukawa coupling. The production rate of a SM Higgs boson in association with bottom quarks is very small at both the Tevatron and the LHC. In a two-Higgs doublet model or in the MSSM, however, the bottom Yukawa coupling can be significantly enhanced over the Standard Model coupling, leading to an observable production rate in some regions of the parameter space. I will review the status of the predictions for hadronic Higgs production with top and bottom quarks and present some details of the calculation of NLO QCD corrections to the underlying production processes. I will present results for the total and differential cross sections to pp(p\bar p) -> t \bar th, b\bar b h at NLO QCD at both the Tevatron and the LHC and will discuss the remaining theoretical uncertainties.