Eur. Phys. J. Plus (2019) 134: 288
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/i2019-12614-2

Regular Article

VHH production at the high-luminosity LHC

¹ Nikhef, Science Park 105, NL-1098 XG, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
² Laboratoire de Physique Theorique et Hautes Energies (LPTHE), UMR 7589 CNRS & Sorbonne Université, 4 Place Jussieu, F-75252, Paris, France
³ Institute for Theoretical Physics Amsterdam and Delta Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Amsterdam, Science Park 904, 1098 XH, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

^* e-mail: apapaefs@cern.ch

Received: 15 July 2018
Accepted: 5 March 2019
Published online: 26 June 2019

Abstract

We study the phenomenology of associated production of a vector boson with a pair of Higgs bosons (VHH at the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC). Despite the low rate of this channel, the scaling of the cross section suggests a measurement could be a useful probe of modifications of the trilinear Higgs boson coupling and anomalous interactions in the gauge-Higgs sector. We focus on both WHH and ZHH production, using the leptonic ( , , decay modes of the vector bosons and the di-Higgs decay mode. We show that top pair backgrounds are problematic for the and channels, leaving as the most promising decay mode. However, even for this channel, we find limited sensitivity due to a low signal rate. We discuss some potential avenues for improvement.