Anomalous Higgs-boson coupling effects in HWW production at the LHC

We study the LHC associated production of a Higgs boson and a W+W− vector-boson pair at 14 TeV, in the standard model and beyond. We consider different signatures corresponding to the cleanest H and W decay channels and discuss the potential of the high-luminosity phase of the LHC. In particular, we investigate the sensitivity of the HW+W− production to possible anomalous Higgs couplings to vector bosons and fermions. Since the b-quark initiated partonic channel contributes significantly to this process, we find a moderate sensitivity to both the size and sign of an anomalous top-quark Yukawa coupling, because perturbative unitarity in the standard model implies a destructive interference in the bb¯ subprocess. We show that a combination of various signatures can reach ∼9 standard-deviation sensitivity in the presently allowed negative region of the top-Higgs coupling, if not previously excluded.