Single top and Higgs associated production as a probe of the Htt coupling sign at the LHC

Abstract

The LHC sensitivity to an anomalous Higgs coupling to the top quark in the Higgs-top associated production is analyzed. Thanks to the strong destructive interference in the t-channel for standard model couplings, this process can be very sensitive to both the magnitude and the sign of a nonstandard top-Higgs coupling. We analyze cross sections and the main irreducible backgrounds for the $H \to \gamma \gamma$ decay channel. Sensitivities to an anomalous sign for the top Yukawa coupling are found to be large. In particular, at \sqrt{s}=14 TeV, assuming a universal rescaling in the Yukawa sector, a parton-level analysis with realistic selection cuts gives a signal-to-background ratio S/B ~ 5, for -1.5 < Y_t/Y_t^{SM} < 0. A number of events S ~ 10 (with corresponding significances ~ 3 \sigma) are expected for 60 fb^{-1}, to be compared with the standard-model expectation S ~ 0.3.