Interference effects for Higgs-mediated Z-pair plus jet production

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We study interference effects in the production channel ZZ + jet, in particular focusing on the role of the Higgs boson. This production channel receives contributions both from Higgs boson-mediated diagrams via the decay H → ZZ (signal diagrams), as well as from diagrams where the Z-bosons couple directly to a quark loop (background diagrams). We consider the partonic processes gggZZ and gq q ZZ in which interference between signal and background diagrams first occurs. Since interference is primarily an off-resonant effect for the Higgs boson, we treat the Z-bosons as on-shell. Thus our analysis is limited to the region above threshold, where the invariant mass of the Z-pair, mZZ, satisfies the condition mZZ>2mZ. In the region mZZ > 300 GeV we find that the interference in the ZZ + jet channel is qualitatively similar to interference in the inclusive ZZ channel. Moreover, the rates are sufficient to study these effects at the LHC once jet-binned data become available.