Top-Yukawa contributions to bbH production at the LHC

We study the production of a Higgs boson in association with bottom quarks $ \left(b\overline{b}H\right) $ in hadronic collisions at the LHC, including the different contributions stemming from terms proportional to the top-quark Yukawa coupling (y$_{t}^{2}$ ), to the bottom-quark one (y$_{b}^{2}$ ), and to their interference (y$_{b}$y$_{t}$). Our results are accurate to next-to-leading order in QCD, employ the four-flavour scheme and the (Born-improved) heavy-top quark approximation. We find that next-to-leading order corrections to the y$_{t}^{2}$ component are sizable, making it the dominant production mechanism for associated $ b\overline{b}H $ production in the Standard Model and increasing its inclusive rate by almost a factor of two. By studying final-state distributions of the various contributions, we identify observables and selection cuts that can be used to select the various components and to improve the experimental sensitivity of $ b\overline{b}H $ production on the bottom-quark Yukawa coupling.