Associated Z⁰H⁰ production with leptonic decays at LHC in next-to-leading order QCD

In this work we investigate the effects of the littlest Higgs model (LHM) up to the QCD next-to-leading order (NLO) on the $Z^0H^0$ associated production at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). We study the dependences of the leading order and NLO QCD corrected integrated cross sections for this process on the factorization/renormalization scale and the LHM parameters. We also provide the distributions of the transverse momenta of final decay products $\mu^-$ and $\tau^-$. Our results show that the heavy neutral gauge bosons $Z_H$ and $A_H$ could induce significant discrepancies from the standard model predictions. It is found that when the LHM parameters are taken as $c=0.5$, $c^{\prime}=0.22$, $f=4 TeV$ and $\mu=(M_H+M_Z)/2$, the effects at the $\sqrt{s}=14 TeV$ LHC from the heavy neutral gauge boson are about 12.83% and 10.37% to the leading order and NLO QCD corrected integrated cross sections, respectively. We also conclude that the NLO QCD corrections at the $\sqrt{s}=14 TeV$ LHC can obviously reduce the scale uncertainty of the integrated cross section, and significantly enhance the differential cross sections of $p_T^{\mu^-}$ and $p_T^{\tau^-}$. It demonstrates that the precision measurement of the $Z^0H^0$ associated production process at the LHC could provide the clue of the LHM physics.