Top partners and Higgs boson production

Abstract

The Higgs boson is produced at the LHC through gluon fusion at roughly the Standard Model rate. New colored fermions, which can contribute to $gg\rightarrow h$, must have vector-like interactions in order not to be in conflict with the experimentally measured rate. We examine the size of the corrections to single and double Higgs production from heavy vector-like fermions in $SU(2)_L$ singlets and doublets and search for regions of parameter space where double Higgs production is enhanced relative to the Standard Model prediction. We compare production rates and distributions for double Higgs production from gluon fusion using an exact calculation, the low energy theorem (LET), where the top quark and the heavy vector-like fermions are taken to be infinitely massive, and an effective theory (EFT) where top mass effects are included exactly and the effects of the heavy fermions are included to ${\cal O}(1/M^2_X)$. Unlike the LET, the EFT gives an extremely accurate description of the kinematic distributions for double Higgs production.