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Michael Spira

Publications and source records attributed to Michael Spira.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Higgs Boson Pair Production via Gluon Fusion: Higher-Order Corrections and Theoretical Uncertainties

In this contribution, the higher-order QCD and electroweak corrections to Standard Model Higgs boson pair production via the gluon-fusion mechanism, $gg\to hh$, are summarized and the different sources of theoretical uncertainty are assessed. The discussion includes finite top quark mass effects, matching to parton showers, approximate NNLO and N$^3$LO QCD corrections, NLO electroweak effects, and uncertainties associated with the top quark mass scheme and perturbative scale choices. In addition, we provide an updated state-of-the-art recommendation for the inclusive gluon-fusion Higgs boson pair production cross section and the corresponding Higgs boson pair invariant-mass distribution.

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arXiv2026

Electroweak Higgs boson pair production: Updated inclusive cross sections

We present updated inclusive cross sections for electroweak Higgs boson pair production for energies of relevance to the LHC and High-Luminosity phase of the LHC. The cross sections are presented at N$^3$LO QCD+NLO EW for vector-boson fusion and NNLO QCD for associate production with a vector boson. We compute the cross sections using the most up-to-date theory inputs, both in the Standard Model and for a few anomalous values of the trilinear Higgs self-coupling.

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arXiv2025

Higgs-Pair Production via Gluon Fusion: Top-Yukawa- and light-quark-induced electroweak Corrections

Gluon fusion, $gg\to HH$, is the dominant Higgs-pair production process at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and provides the first direct access to the trilinear Higgs self-interaction. The process is loop-induced, with the main contribution emerging from top-quark loops within the Standard Model. In the past, the QCD corrections have been calculated and found to increase the cross section significantly. With the anticipated accuracies achievable at the high-luminosity LHC (HL--LHC), the theoretical uncertainties will be of increased relevance to compete with the experimental precision at the level of less than 30\%. In this work, we take the next steps towards the determination of the complete electroweak corrections at next-to-leading order by calculating the full top-Yukawa and light-quark induced corrections. These corrections modify the cross section moderately in the kinematical regimes of interest.

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arXiv2025

Charged Higgs Pairs at the LHC: A NLO Analysis

Charged Higgs-boson pair production at hadron colliders yields information about the trilinear couplings involving charged Higgs fields in extensions of the Standard Model (SM). We consider the type-I two-Higgs doublet model (2HDM) extension and obtain next-to-leading order QCD predictions for the charged-Higgs pair production ($H^+H^-$ production). All production modes, i.e. Drell--Yan-like production, gluon fusion and vector-boson fusion are included in the analysis. We determine uncertainties originating from the scale dependence, the parton-density functions and strong coupling $\alpha_s$ at the LHC. We observe that the QCD corrections lead to a significant reduction of the relative scale dependences. These improved predictions will allow for a quantitative interpretation of experimental measurements, in case that charged Higgs states will be observed.

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arXiv2025

Higgs-Boson Decays: Updates

In this contribution, new developments for the Standard Model Higgs-boson decays will be summarized. This addresses extensions of the grids used by {\tt Hdecay} to implement finite NLO mass effects for $H\to gg$ as well as explicit numbers for the branching fraction for the strange-Yukawa induced part of $H\to s\bar s$ together with the related uncertainties. In addition, first results of the strong and weak Dalitz decays of the Higgs-boson decays $H\to s\bar s + g/\gamma$ are presented. The Dalitz decays define the separation between the Yukawa-induced part and the continuum, that is not induced by the strange-Yukawa coupling, and thus pave the way towards a solid determination of the strange-Yukawa coupling at future $e^+e^-$ colliders, but will also be relevant for solid bounds on the strange-Yukawa coupling at the LHC.

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arXiv2025

Modelling $b\bar b H$ production for the LHC at 13.6 TeV

We present new state-of-the-art predictions for Standard Model Higgs boson production in association with a bottom-quark pair ($b\bar bH$). Updated cross sections are computed in accordance with the recommendations of the LHC Higgs Working Group, including the use of the PDF4LHC21 set of parton distribution functions, with a center-of-mass energy of 13.6 TeV. For the total inclusive cross section, we provide matched predictions of the massless five-flavour scheme and the massive four-flavour scheme at the fixed-order level. We further present recently obtained simulations matched to parton showers in both flavour schemes within the Standard Model, and also discuss them in the context of potential Beyond-the-Standard-Model scenarios. In the massless scheme, we compare different next-to-next-to-leading order predictions matched to parton showers obtained through the MiNNLOPS and GENEVA generators. In addition, the role of four-flavour scheme predictions is studied as a background to $HH$ searches, considering both the top-quark and bottom-quark Yukawa contributions to $b\bar bH$ production. Finally, we analyse the sensitivity of the Higgs transverse momentum spectrum to light-quark Yukawa couplings in the diphoton decay channel based on MiNNLOPS simulations.

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arXiv2024

Ad interim recommendations for the Higgs boson production cross sections at $\sqrt{s} = 13.6$ TeV

This note documents predictions for the inclusive production cross sections of the Standard Model Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider at a centre of mass energy of 13.6 TeV. The predictions here are based on simple extrapolations of previously documented predictions published in the CERN Yellow Report "Deciphering the Nature of the Higgs Sector". The predictions documented in this note should serve as a reference while a more complete and update-to-date derivation of cross section predictions is in progress.

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arXiv2023

Charged Higgs-Boson Decays into Quarks

We consider the full genuine next-to-leading order SUSY-QCD corrections to the charged Higgs decays into quarks supplemented by the NNLO corrections to the effective top and bottom Yukawa couplings. The NNLO corrections to the effective top Yukawa coupling are a new ingredient of our analysis. We arrive at an approximate NNLO prediction for MSSM charged Higgs decays after including the N$^4$LO QCD corrections for large charged Higgs masses. The residual uncertainties are in the percent range or below, depending on the particular MSSM scenario.

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arXiv2022

Report of the Topical Group on Top quark physics and heavy flavor production for Snowmass 2021

This report summarizes the work of the Energy Frontier Topical Group on EW Physics: Heavy flavor and top quark physics (EF03) of the 2021 Community Summer Study (Snowmass). It aims to highlight the physics potential of top-quark studies and heavy-flavor production processes (bottom and charm) at the HL-LHC and possible future hadron and lepton colliders and running scenarios.

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arXiv2022

Pseudoscalar MSSM Higgs Production at NLO SUSY--QCD

One of the most important mechanisms at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for the production of the pseudoscalar Higgs boson of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) is the loop-induced gluon fusion process $gg\to A$. The higher-order QCD corrections have been obtained a long time ago and turned out to be large. However, the genuine supersymmetric (SUSY--)QCD corrections have been obtained only in the limit of large SUSY particle masses so far. We describe our calculation of the next-to-leading-order (NLO) SUSY--QCD results with full mass dependence and present numerical results for a few representative benchmark points. We also address the treatment of the effective top and bottom Yukawa couplings, in the case of heavy SUSY particles, in terms of effective low-energy theories where the heavy degrees of freedom have been decoupled. Furthermore, we include a discussion of the relation between the SUSY--QCD corrections that we have computed and the Adler--Bardeen theorem for the axial anomaly. In addition, we apply our results to the gluonic and photonic pseudoscalar Higgs decays $A\to gg,γγ$ at NLO.

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arXiv2022

Top-Yukawa-induced Corrections to Higgs Pair Production

Higgs-boson pair production at hadron colliders is dominantly mediated by the loop-induced gluon-fusion process $gg\to HH$ that is generated by heavy top loops within the Standard Model with a minor per-cent level contamination of bottom-loop contributions. The QCD corrections turn out to be large for this process. In this note, we derive the top-Yukawa-induced part of the electroweak corrections to this process and discuss their relation to an effective trilinear Higgs coupling with integrated out top-quark contributions.

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arXiv2022

$m_b$ at $m_H$: the running bottom quark mass and the Higgs boson

We present a new measurement of the bottom quark mass in the $\bar{MS}$ scheme at the renormalization scale of the Higgs boson mass from measurements of Higgs boson decay rates at the LHC: $m_b(m_H)= 2.60^{+0.36}_{-0.31}$ GeV. The measurement has a negligible theory uncertainty and excellent prospects to improve at the HL-LHC and a future Higgs factory. Confronting this result, and $m_b(m_b)$ from low-energy measurements and $m_b(m_Z)$ from $Z-$pole data, with the prediction of the scale evolution of the renormalization group equations, we find strong evidence for the "running" of the bottom quark mass.

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arXiv2021

Next-to-leading-order QCD corrections and parton-shower effects for weakino+squark production at the LHC

We present a calculation of the next-to-leading order QCD corrections to weakino+squark production processes at hadron colliders and their implementation in the framework of the POWHEG-BOX, a tool for the matching of fixed-order perturbative calculations with parton-shower programs. Particular care is taken in the subtraction of on-shell resonances in the real-emission corrections that have to be assigned to production processes of a different type. In order to illustrate the capabilities of our code, representative results are shown for selected SUSY parameter points in the pMSSM11. The perturbative stability of the calculation is assessed for the $ pp \rightarrow \tildeχ^0_1 \tilde{d}_L $ process. For the squark+chargino production process $ pp \rightarrow \tildeχ_1^- \tilde{u}_L $ distributions of the chargino's decay products are provided with the help of the decay feature of PYTHIA 8.

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arXiv2021

Sensitivity to BSM effects in the Higgs $p_T$ spectrum within SMEFT

The study of Higgs boson production at large transverse momentum is one of the new frontiers for the LHC Higgs physics programme. This paper considers boosted Higgs production in the Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SMEFT). We focus on the gluon fusion and $t{\bar t}H$ production processes and study the effects of three dimension-6 operators: the top Yukawa operator, the gluon-Higgs effective coupling and the chromomagnetic dipole operator of the top quark. We perform a detailed study of the sensitivity of current and future LHC data to the corresponding Wilson coefficients, consistently accounting for their renormalisation group evolution. We compare the sensitivities obtained with only linear and linear + quadratic terms in the SMEFT by using the spectrum shape and the addition of the Higgs signal yields. We also consider fits of $p_T$ spectra in models with heavy-top partners and in MSSM scenarios with a light scalar top and study the validity of the SMEFT assumptions as a function of the new-particle masses and the Higgs $p_T$ range. Finally, we extract constraints on the Wilson coefficients for gluon fusion from a simultaneous fit to the ATLAS and CMS data and compare our results with those obtained in global SMEFT analyses.

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arXiv2021

Higgs Boson Production and Decay at Hadron Colliders

Higgs physics at hadron colliders as the LHC is reviewed within the Standard Model (SM) and its minimal supersymmetric extension (MSSM) by summarizing the present state-of-the-art of theoretical predictions for the production cross sections and decay rates.

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arXiv2020

Refinements of the Bottom and Strange MSSM Higgs Yukawa Couplings at NNLO

We extend the already existing two-loop calculation of the effective bottom-Yukawa coupling in the MSSM. In addition to the resummation of the dominant corrections for large values of tg$β$, we include the subleading terms related to the trilinear Higgs coupling $A_b$ and contributions induced by the electroweak gauge couplings. This calculation has been extended to the NNLO corrections to the MSSM strange-Yukawa coupling. Our analysis leads to residual theoretical uncertainties of the effective Yukawa couplings at the per-cent level.

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arXiv2019

Gluon fusion into Higgs pairs at NLO QCD and the top mass scheme

We present the calculation of the full next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD corrections to Higgs boson pair production via gluon fusion at the LHC, including the exact top-mass dependence in the two-loop virtual and one-loop real corrections. This is the first independent cross-check of the NLO QCD corrections presented in the literature before. Our calculation relies on numerical integrations of Feynman integrals, stabilised with integration-by-parts and a Richardson extrapolation to the narrow width approximation. We present results for the total cross section as well as for the invariant Higgs-pair-mass distribution at the LHC, including for the first time a study of the uncertainty due to the scheme and scale choice for the top mass in the loops.

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