Associated Z 0 H 0 production with leptonic decays at LHC in next-to-leading order QCD
Abstract
In this work we investigate the effects of the littlest Higgs model (LHM) up to the QCD next-to-leading order (NLO) on the
Z
0
H
0
associated production at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). We study the dependences of the leading order and NLO QCD corrected integrated cross sections for this process on the factorization/renormalization scale and the LHM parameters. We also provide the distributions of the transverse momenta of final decay products
μ
−
and
τ
−
. Our results show that the heavy neutral gauge bosons
Z
H
and
A
H
could induce significant discrepancies from the standard model predictions. It is found that when the LHM parameters are taken as
c=0.5
,
c
′
=0.22
,
f=4TeV
and
μ=(
M
H
+
M
Z
)/2
, the effects at the
s
√
=14TeV
LHC from the heavy neutral gauge boson are about 12.83% and 10.37% to the leading order and NLO QCD corrected integrated cross sections, respectively. We also conclude that the NLO QCD corrections at the
s
√
=14TeV
LHC can obviously reduce the scale uncertainty of the integrated cross section, and significantly enhance the differential cross sections of
p
μ
−
T
and
p
τ
−
T
. It demonstrates that the precision measurement of the
Z
0
H
0
associated production process at the LHC could provide the clue of the LHM physics.