Speaker
Description
Precise measurements of Higgs boson production in association with top-quark pairs
allow for constraints on the top-quark Yukawa coupling, which in turn is crucial to fully
characterise the scalar sector of the Standard Model and could also open a window on
Beyond-the-Standard-Model interactions. At the Large Hadron Collider, searches for
$t\bar{t}H$ production in the dominant $H \to b \bar{b}$ channel are plagued by a large QCD background,
which is dominated by $t \bar{t}$ production in association with a $b \bar{b}$ pair. The detailed understanding of this multi-particle and multi-scale background process is of crucial importance for the sensitivity of $t\bar{t}H(\to b \bar{b})$ analyses.
Motivated by the fact that state-of-the-art Monte Carlo simulations for this background suffer from uncertainties related to the modeling of extra light-jet radiation, I present a study for $t \bar{t} b \bar{b}+$jet production at NLO QCD. The focus is on effects and uncertainties in observables
relevant for $t\bar{t}H(b\bar{b})$ analyses.
At the technical level this calculation represents the first application of a new on-the-fly integrand reduction algorithm implemented in OpenLoops2.