Abstract: Next-to-leading order QCD corrections to the QCD-induced pp -> l(+)l(-)gamma j j + X and pp -> <(nu)lover bar>(l)nu(l)gamma(jj) + X processes are presented. The latter is used to find an optimal cut to reduce the contribution of radiative photon emission off the charged leptons in the first channel. As expected, the scale uncertainties are significantly reduced at NLO and the QCD corrections are phase-space dependent and important for precise measurements at the LHC.

Abstract: After the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the study of its properties still leaves room for an extended Higgs sector with more than one Higgs boson. 2-Higgs doublet models (2HDMs) are well-motivated extensions of the Standard Model (SM) with five physical Higgs bosons: two CP-even states h and H, one CP-odd state A, and two charged states H-+/-. In this letter, we present the calculation of the full next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD corrections to hH and AA production at the LHC in the 2HDM at small values of the ratio of the vacuum expectation values, tan beta, including the exact top-mass dependence everywhere in the calculation. Using techniques applied in the NLO QCD SM Higgs pair production calculation, we present results for the total cross section as well as for the Higgs-pair-mass distribution at the LHC. We also provide the top-quark scale and scheme uncertainties which are found to be sizeable.

Abstract: Higgs production in association with three jets via gluon fusion is an important channel for the measurement of the CP properties of the Higgs particle at the LHC. In this paper, we go beyond the heavy top effective theory approximation and include at LO the full mass dependence of the top- and bottom-quark contributions. We consider the dominant subchannel gg -> Hggg which involves the manipulation of massive rank-5 hexagon integrals. Furthermore, we present results for several differential distributions and show deviations from the effective theory as large as 100% at high p(T) for light Higgs masses.

Abstract: We present a study of W+W+ jj and W-W-jj production including leptonic decays in hadron-hadron collisions. The full electroweak and QCD induced contributions and their interferences are calculated at leading order. We find that, for inclusive cuts, the interference effects can be large if the jets are produced with large transverse momentum where, however, the production rate is suppressed. We also discuss the vector-boson-fusion cuts and show the validity of the vector-boson-fusion approximation. The next-to-leading order QCD corrections to the QCD-induced channels are also calculated. Compared to the previous calculation, we allow the intermediate W bosons to be off shell. For on-shell W production, we obtain an excellent agreement with previous results. Our code will be publicly available as part of the parton level Monte Carlo program VBFLNO.

Abstract: We consider electroweak Higgs plus three jets production at NLO QCD beyond strict VBF acceptance cuts. We investigate, for the first time, how accurate the VBF approximation is in these regions and within perturbative uncertainties by a detailed comparison of full and approximate calculations. We find that a rapidity gap between the tagging jets guarantees a good approximation, while an invariant mass cut alone is not sufficient, which needs to be confronted with experimental choices. We also find that a significant part of the QCD corrections can be attributed to Higgs-Strahlungs-type topologies.