Electroweak production of Higgs boson pairs in 2HDMs

Abstract

One of the main features of a Two-Higgs Doublet Model (2HDM) is the presence of two additional neutral Higgs states, besides the one mimicking the ~125 GeV state observed at the LHC. The three Higgs bosons of a 2HDM can be produced at the LHC either singly via gluon fusion or in pairs with each other. When analyzing their pair production, the emphasis is laid on gluon-initiated processes, and the electroweak (EW) production is generally not treated on the same footing, assuming its contribution to be highly subleading. We show here that when the sum of the masses of the lightest scalar and pseudoscalar Higgs bosons in the Type-I 2HDM is smaller than the Z-boson mass, their EW pair production can dominate over QCD pair production by orders of magnitude.