Heavy Higgs boson resonances and their decay into top quarks at the LHC

Abstract

We investigate, within the type-II two-Higgs-doublet extension of the standard model (SM), the impact of heavy neutral Higgs boson resonances with unsuppressed Yukawa couplings to top quarks on top-quark pair production at the LHC at next-to-leading order (NLO) in the strong coupling constant. We take into account the resonant Higgs boson contributions, the non-resonant SM t t continuum and the interference of these two contributions. The NLO QCD corrections to heavy Higgs production and the interference contributions are calculated in the large top-quark mass (mt) limit, including an effective K-factor rescaling. Our evaluation of the QCD-Higgs interference is focused on the Higgs resonance region. Using representative CP-conserving as well as CP-violating parameter scenarios phenomenological results are presented for different observables.