Higgs characterisation via vector-boson fusion and associated production: NLO and parton-shower effects

Vector-boson fusion and associated production at the LHC can provide key information on the strength and structure of the Higgs couplings to the Standard Model particles. Using an effective field theory approach, we study the effects of next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD corrections matched to a parton shower on selected observables for various spin-0 hypotheses. We find that inclusion of NLO corrections is needed to reduce the theoretical uncertainties on the total rates as well as to reliably predict the shapes of the distributions. Our results are obtained in a fully automatic way via FeynRules and MadGraph5_aMC@NLO.