Top-quark decay into Higgs boson and a light quark at next-to-leading order in QCD

Abstract

Neutral flavor-changing transitions are hugely suppressed in the Standard Model and therefore they are very sensitive to new physics. We consider the decay rate of t->u_i h where u_i=u,c using an effective field theory approach. We perform the calculation at NLO in QCD including the relevant dimension-six operators. We find that at NLO the contribution from the flavor-changing chromomagnetic operator is as important as the standard QCD correction to the flavor-changing Yukawa coupling. In addition to improving the accuracy of the theoretical predictions, the NLO calculation provides information on the operator mixing under the renormalization group.