Resummation of soft and Coulomb corrections for $$ t\overline{t}h $$ production at the LHC

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, a combined resummation of soft and Coulomb corrections is performed for the associated production of the Higgs boson with a top quark pair at the LHC. We illustrate the similarities and critical differences between this process and the $$ t\overline{t} $$ t t ¯ production process. We show that up to the next-to-leading power, the total cross section for $$ t\overline{t}h $$ t t ¯ h production admits a similar factorization formula in the threshold limit as that for tt production. This fact, however, is not expected to hold at higher powers. Based on the factorization formula, we perform the resummation at the improved next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy, and match to the next-to-leading order result. This allows us to give NLL′+NLO predictions for the total cross sections at the LHC. We find that the resummation effects enhance the NLO cross sections by about 6%, and significantly reduce the scale dependence of the theoretical predictions.