Entangling Higgs production associated with a single top and a top-quark pair in the presence of anomalous top-Yukawa coupling

The ATLAS and CMS collaborations observed a mild excess in the associated Higgs production with a top-quark pair (tt̄h) and reported the signal strengths of μ_tth^ATLAS=1.81±0.80 and μ_tth^CMS=2.75±0.99 based on the data collected at √s= 7 and 8 TeV. Although, at the current stage, there is no obvious indication whether the excess is real or due to statistical fluctuations, here we perform a case study of this mild excess by exploiting the strong entanglement between the associated Higgs production with a single top quark (thX) and tt̄h production in the presence of anomalous top-Yukawa coupling. As well known, tt̄h production only depends on the absolute value of the top-Yukawa coupling. Meanwhile, in thX production, this degeneracy is lifted through the strong interference between the two main contributions which are proportional to the top-Yukawa and the gauge-Higgs couplings, respectively. Especially, when the relative sign of the top-Yukawa coupling with respect to the gauge-Higgs coupling is reversed, the thX cross section can be enhanced by more than one order of magnitude. We perform a detailed study of the influence of thX production on tt̄h production in the presence of the anomalous top-Yukawa coupling and point out that it is crucial to include thX production in the analysis of the tt̄h data to pin down the sign and the size of the top-Yukawa coupling in future. While assuming the Standard Model (SM) value for the gauge-Higgs coupling, we vary the top-Yukawa coupling within the range allowed by the current LHC Higgs data. We consider the Higgs decay modes into multileptons, bb̄ and γγ putting a particular emphasis on the same sign dilepton events. We also discuss the prospects for the LHC Run-2 on how to disentangle thX production from tt̄h one and how to probe the anomalous top-Yukawa coupling.