Production of heavy Higgs bosons and decay into top quarks at the LHC

We investigate the production of heavy, neutral Higgs boson resonances and their decays to top-quark top-antiquark ($t\bar{t}$) pairs at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at next-to-leading order (NLO) in the strong coupling of quantum chromodynamics (QCD). The NLO corrections to heavy Higgs boson production and the Higgs-QCD interference are calculated in the large $m_t$ limit with an effective K-factor rescaling. The nonresonant $t\bar{t}$ background is taken into account at NLO QCD including weak-interaction corrections. In order to consistently determine the total decay widths of the heavy Higgs bosons, we consider for definiteness the type-II two-Higgs-doublet extension of the standard model and choose three parameter scenarios that entail two heavy neutral Higgs bosons with masses above the $t\bar{t}$ threshold and unsuppressed Yukawa couplings to top quarks. For these three scenarios we compute, for the LHC operating at 13 TeV, the $t\bar{t}$ cross section and the distributions of the $t\bar{t}$ invariant mass, of the transverse top-quark momentum and rapidity, and of the cosine of the Collins-Soper angle with and without the two heavy Higgs resonances. For selected $M_{t\bar{t}}$ bins we estimate the significances for detecting a heavy Higgs signal in the $t\bar{t}$ dileptonic and lepton plus jets decay channels.