One of the puzzles of the SM is the large hierarchy between the Yukawa couplings of different flavours. Yukawa couplings of the first and the second generation are constrained only very weakly so far. However, one can obtain large deviations in the Yukawa couplings in several New Physics (NP) models, such as e.g. models with new vector-like quarks, or new Higgs bosons that couple naturally to individual fermion families. In this work, we investigate the potential bounds on the NP Higgs Yukawa couplings modification κ f for light quarks from double-Higgs at the LHC, starting from a model independent formalism. We have looked at the two Higgs boson final state bbγγ, and the relevant experimental cuts to reduce backgrounds and estimated the potential exclusion bounds for κ f . We have considered both linear and non-linear effective field theory for the Higgs light quark coupling modifications.

We compute the next-to-leading virtual QCD corrections to the partonic cross section of the production of a Higgs boson in association with a Z boson in gluon fusion. The calculation is based on the recently introduced method of evaluating the amplitude via an expansion in terms of a small transverse momentum. We generalize the method to the case of different masses in the final state and of a process not symmetric in the forward-backward direction exchange. Our analytic approach gives a very good approximation (better than percent) of the partonic cross section in the center of mass energy region up to ∼ 750 GeV, where at the LHC ∼ 98% of the total hadronic cross section is concentrated.

The measurements carried out at LEP and SLC projected us into the precision era of electroweak physics. This has also been relevant in the theoretical interpretation of LHCb and Belle measurements of rare B semileptonic decays, paving the road for new physics with the inference of lepton universality violation in $$ {R}_{K^{\left(\ast \right)}} $$ R K ∗ ratios. The simplest explanation of these flavour anomalies — sizeable one-loop contributions respecting Minimal Flavour Violation — is currently disfavoured by electroweak precision data. In this work, we discuss how to completely relieve the present tension between electroweak constraints and one-loop minimal flavour violating solutions to $$ {R}_{K^{\left(\ast \right)}} $$ R K ∗ . We determine the correlations in the Standard Model Effective Field Theory that highlight the existence of such a possibility. Then, we consider minimal extensions of the Standard Model where our effective-field-theory picture can be realized. We discuss how these solutions to b → sℓℓ anomalies, respecting electroweak precision and without any new source of flavour violation, may point to the existence of a Z′ boson at around the TeV scale, within the discovery potential of LHC, or to leptoquark scenarios.

We calculate the dominant contributions of third generation four-quark operators to single-Higgs production and decay. They enter via loop corrections to Higgs decays into gluons, photons and $$ b\overline{b} $$ b b ¯ , and in Higgs production via gluon fusion and in association with top quark pairs. We show that these loop effects can, in some cases, lead to better constraints than those from fits to top quark data. Finally, we investigate whether these four-fermion operators can spoil the determination of the trilinear Higgs self-coupling from fits to single-Higgs data.

The differential cross-section of prompt inclusive production of long-lived charged particles in proton-proton collisions is measured using a data sample recorded by the LHCb experiment at a centre-of-mass energy of $$ \sqrt{s} $$ s = 13 TeV. The data sample, collected with an unbiased trigger, corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 5.4 nb−1. The differential cross-section is measured as a function of transverse momentum and pseudorapidity in the ranges pT ∈ [80, 10 000) MeV/c and η ∈ [2.0, 4.8) and is determined separately for positively and negatively charged particles. The results are compared with predictions from various hadronic-interaction models.