Full NLO QCD predictions for Higgs-pair production in the 2-Higgs-doublet model

Abstract After the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the study of its properties still leaves room for an extended Higgs sector with more than one Higgs boson. 2-Higgs doublet models (2HDMs) are well-motivated extensions of the Standard Model (SM) with five physical Higgs bosons: two CP-even states h and H, one CP-odd state A, and two charged states $$H^\pm _{}$$ H ± . In this letter, we present the calculation of the full next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD corrections to hH and AA production at the LHC in the 2HDM at small values of the ratio of the vacuum expectation values, $$\tan \beta $$ tan β , including the exact top-mass dependence everywhere in the calculation. Using techniques applied in the NLO QCD SM Higgs pair production calculation, we present results for the total cross section as well as for the Higgs-pair-mass distribution at the LHC. We also provide the top-quark scale and scheme uncertainties which are found to be sizeable