Revisit prompt J/ψ production in associated with Higgs boson via gluon fusion at the LHC

Abstract

The production of charmonium associated with Higgs boson via gluon fusion has been investigated by Kniehl, Palisoc, and Zwirner [Phys. Rev. D 66, 114002 (2002)] in which they considered the contribution of the final Higgs boson radiation off the charm quark at tree level and found that this process is far too rare to be observable in any of the considered experiments. In this paper, the production of prompt $J/\ensuremath{\psi}$ associated with the Higgs boson via gluon fusion at the 14 TeV LHC within the factorization formalism of nonrelativistic quantum chromodynamics is revisited. After considering the contribution from the final Higgs boson radiation off the top quark in the loop, which is more than 3 orders of magnitudes higher than the charm quark at tree level, the production of prompt $J/\ensuremath{\psi}$ associated with the Higgs boson has great potential to be detected. The prompt $J/\ensuremath{\psi}$ production includes the direct production and indirect production via radiative or hadronic decays of high excited charmonium states. For the direct $J/\ensuremath{\psi}+H$ production via loop-induced gluon fusion, the ${^{3}S}_{1}^{(8)}$ Fock state gives the dominant contribution to the cross section, which is about 95% of the total direct production. The indirect loop-induced contribution is appreciable, since the summation of $\ensuremath{\psi}(2S)+H$, ${\ensuremath{\chi}}_{c1}+H$ and ${\ensuremath{\chi}}_{c2}+H$ is about 34% of the total cross section of prompt $J/\ensuremath{\psi}+H$. The indirect contribution from ${\ensuremath{\chi}}_{c0}+H$ is tiny and can be neglected. With great potential to be detected, prompt $J/\ensuremath{\psi}$ production associated with the Higgs boson can help us to further understand the mechanism of the color octet, as well as being useful to further investigate the coupling of the Higgs boson and fermions.