Impact of the Higgs boson on the production of exotic particles at the LHC

Many new physics models contain new particles that interact with the Higgs boson. These particles could be produced at the LHC via gluon-gluon fusion with an off-shell Higgs and, if charged under a gauge group, also via gluon-gluon fusion with an off-shell Z boson and the Drell-Yan process. We consider in this paper simplified scenarios where the Standard Model is extended by one scalar or fermionic field that interacts with the Higgs boson, and we evaluate the impact of the Higgs interaction on the production of the exotic particles at the LHC. This analysis applies, in particular, to TeV-scale seesaw scenarios of neutrino mass generation.