Top-Yukawa contributions to bbH production at the LHC

We study the production of a Higgs boson in association with bottom quarks (b (b) over barH) in hadronic collisions at the LHC, including the different contributions stemming from terms proportional to the top-quark Yukawa coupling (y(t)(2)), to the bottom-quark one (y(b)(2)), and to their interference (yb yt). Our results are accurate to next-to-leading order in QCD, employ the four-flavour scheme and the (Born-improved) heavy-top quark approximation. We find that next-to-leading order corrections to the y(t)(2) component are sizable, making it the dominant production mechanism for associated b (b) over barH production in the Standard Model and increasing its inclusive rate by almost a factor of two. By studying final-state distributions of the various contributions, we identify observables and selection cuts that can be used to select the various components and to improve the experimental sensitivity of b (b) over barH production on the bottom-quark Yukawa coupling.