Associated production of Higgs bosons and heavy quarks at the LHC: Predictions with thekT-factorization approach

Abstract

In the framework of the ${k}_{T}$-factorization approach, we study the production of Higgs bosons associated with a heavy (beauty or top) quark pair at the CERN LHC collider conditions. Our consideration is based mainly on the off-shell gluon-gluon fusion subprocess ${g}^{*}{g}^{*}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}Q\overline{Q}H$. The corresponding matrix element squared has been calculated for the first time. We investigate the total and differential cross sections of $b\overline{b}H$ and $t\overline{t}H$ production taking into account also the non-negligible contribution from the $q\overline{q}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}Q\overline{Q}H$ mechanism. In the numerical calculations we use the unintegrated gluon distributions obtained from the Ciafaloni-Catani-Fiorani-Marchesini evolution equation. Our results are compared with the leading predictions of the collinear factorization of QCD.