Z. Phys.

C - Particles and Fields 39, 583-584 (1988)

for Physik C

F 'tides

9 Springer-Verlag 1988

Higgs boson pair production from quark antiquark annihilation

D.A. Dicus Center for Particle Theory, Universityof Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA Received22 February 1988

Abstract. The contribution to the cross section for the production of pairs of Higgs bosons from quark antiquark annihilation is determined. This contribution comes entirely from box graphs of vector bosons and is significantly smaller than the production of pairs of Higgs by gluon fusion or vector boson fusion.

The symmetry breaking sector of the electroweak interaction will be tested in the next generation of accelerators by attempting to find and study one or more light (less than 1 TeV) scalar bosons. Various reactions for producing scalar bosons have been studied. The couplings of the scalar bosons to other particles and to themselves depend on the particular model being considered but, at least in the standard model with one Higgs boson, the cross sections for producing one or more Higgs through various reactions is usually small. Given the probable luminosity of future machines such as the Superconducting Supercollider (SSC) or the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and the difficulty of detecting the Higgs boson, a cross section not too much smaller than 1 picobarn seems to be needed. At Super Collider energies the production cross section for a pair of Higgs bosons by vector boson fusion [1, 2] is less than 1/10 picobarns for a small Higgs mass and much smaller still if the Higgs mass should turn out to be large. The production through the parton subprocess of gluon fusion may be larger [2, 3] but only if the top quark has a mass in excess of 100 GeV and even then the cross section is less than one picobarn. Only if other, heavier, quarks exist, and the Higgs is not too massive, can the gluon fusion cross section exceed one picobarn. Thus it seems useful to investigate other mechanisms for producing Higgs bosons, even if, naively, one would expect these mechanisms also to give small cross sections. In this paper we calculate the contribution to the cross section for the production of a pair of Higgs bosons, pp--* H H + X, from the patton subprocess of

quark antiquark annihilation, q~I--*HH. Since the quarks are massless the tree graphs are zero and the lowest order nonzero graphs are the box diagrams shown in Fig. 1. This type of calculation has been done for e + e- annihilation by Gaemers and Hoogeveen [4]. As they point out the contributions from the vertex corrections are all zero. The coupling of the Higgs to the fermions (Fig. lb) is zero to all orders because of the exact chiral symmetry for the massless quarks (Recall that the scalar charged pion prefers to decay to a muon rather than an electron.) The corrections at the Higgs vertex, shown in Fig. lc, are zero by CP conservation. Thus only the box diagrams of Fig. la contribute.

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Fig. la-c. One loop diagrams for q?I~HH

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then use the distribution functions of Duke and Owens [6] (A = 0.2) to convert the parton subprocess cross section into a hadronic cross section. The results are shown in Fig. 2 for both SSC and LHC center of mass energies. As expected naively, and from the results of [4], the cross sections are very small. Shown for comparison are the contributions from vector boson fusion, where the parton subprocess is qEl-+WW(ZZ)qgI~HHqgl, as calculated exactly (and using an effective boson approximation) in [1-2]. Also shown is the contribution fr~)m gluon fusion, go~HH, as calculated in [2], for a top quark mass of 40 GeV. If the top quark is heavier or, more importantly, (because we have no experimental upper bound on their mass), if other heavier quarks exist, gluon fusion will give a larger contribution, although, as mentioned above, it is still usually less than one picobarn. Even for the worst possible case shown in the figure, gg--*HH is still almost an order of magnitude larger than quark antiquark annihilation. Thus, as expected, quark annihilation is not important in the production of Higgs pairs.
Acknowledgement. It is my pleasure to thank Scott Willenbrock for

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telling me of [4] and for many useful conversations. This work was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy under grant DE-FG05-85ER40200.

Fig. 2. Cross sections for double Higgs production as a function of the Higgs mass. The solid curves give the contribution to pp--* H H + X from the quark antiquark annihilation subprocess, q g l ~ H H , as calculated in this paper, at center of mass energies ~/s = 40 TeV (SSC) and x/s = 17 TeV (LHC). The dashed line is the contribution at SSC energy from the gluon fusion subprocess, 09 ~ HH, for a worst case scenario of a top quark mass of 40 TeV and no other heavy quarks. The dotted line gives the contribution at SSC energy from vector boson fusion, W W ~ H H plus Z Z ~ H H

References
i. D.A. Dicus, K.J. Kallianpur, S.S.D. Willenbrock: Phys. Letters 200B (1982) 187 2. D.A. Dicus, C. Kao, S.S.D. Willenbrock: U. of Wisconsin preprint MAD/PH/399, Phys. Letters (to appear) 3. E.W.N. Glover, J.J. van der Bij: CERN preprint TH4934 4. K.J.F. Gaemers, F. Hoogeveen: Z. Phys. C--Particles and Fields 26 (1984) 249 5. G. Passarino, M. Veltman: Nucl. Phys. B160 (1979) 151 6. D.W. Duke, J.R. Owens: Phys. Rev. D30 (1984) 49

As did Gaemers and Hoogeveen, we use the program FORMFactor [5] to calculate the loop integrals. We