Associated production of Higgs boson and heavy quarks at the LHC: predictions with the kt-factorization

Abstract

In the framework of the kt-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 suprocess g + g -> Q + Q + H. The corresponding matrix element squared have been calculated for the first time. We investigate the total and differential cross sections of bbH and ttH production taking into account also the non-negligible contribution from the q + q -> Q + Q + H mechanism. In the numerical calculations we use the unintegrated gluon distributions obtained from the CCFM evolution equation. Our results are compared with the leading and next-to-leading order predictions of the collinear factorization of QCD.