Speaker
Description
The production of a Higgs boson in association with a jet is one of the most important processes studied at the LHC. It serves as a sensitive probe of high-energy dynamics and provides a powerful testing ground for the Standard Model, while also offering sensitivity to possible new physics effects. In phenomenological analyses, loop-induced contributions are often approximated using effective frameworks such as the Higgs Effective Field Theory (HEFT) or the Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SMEFT). However, the reliability of these approximations must be carefully evaluated, particularly in kinematic regimes characterized by large momentum transfer.
In this work, we perform a generation-level analysis of Higgs plus jet production at √s = 13 TeV, using MadGraph5_aMC@NLO framework. We compare predictions obtained from the full loop-induced Standard Model with those derived within the HEFT and SMEFT frameworks. Taking the Higgs transverse momentum as a key observable, we study normalized distributions and ratio spectra above various transverse-momentum thresholds to quantitatively assess the validity of the effective descriptions.
Our results show that effective approaches successfully reproduce the Standard Model behavior in the low transverse-momentum region. However, sizable deviations emerge at high pT, signaling the breakdown of the effective approximation. These findings highlight the importance of carefully accounting for kinematic effects when applying EFT-based methods to precision Higgs studies and provide a quantitative estimate of their range of validity.