NLO QCD corrections to off-shell top-antitop production with leptonic decays in association with a Higgs boson at the LHC

Abstract

We compute the hadronic production of top-antitop pairs in association with a Higgs boson at next-to-leading-order QCD, including the decay of the top and antitop quark into bottom quarks and leptons. Our computation is based on full leading and next-to-leading-order matrix elements for $e^+ \nu_e \mu^-\bar{\nu}_\mu b \bar{b} H(j)$ and includes all non-resonant contributions, off-shell effects and interferences. Numerical results for the integrated cross section and several differential distributions are given for the LHC operating at 13 TeV using a fixed and a dynamical factorization and renormalization scale. The use of the dynamical instead of the fixed scale improves the perturbative stability in high-energy tails of most distributions, while the integrated cross section is hardly affected differing by only about one per cent and leading to the same K factor of 1.17.