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In gluon-fusion Higgs production, two gluons couple to a closed top quark loop, and the Higgs boson couples to that massive quark through its Yukawa interaction. The right panel of the diagram in c shows one explicit colour-flow component: internal $t_r\to t_b$ at one gluon insertion, then $t_b\to t_r$ at the other; the colour-neutral Higgs boson insertion preserves the internal color charge. Include both loop orderings. The color charge factor isso the two incoming gluons are projected onto a colour singlet. The Yukawa coupling is $y_t=\sqrt{2}{m}_t/v$, and the $h\bar{t}t$ vertex has strength $m_t/v$. No direct tree-level $hgg$ mass coupling is needed. Integrating out a sufficiently heavy top quark generates an effective interaction proportional to $(h/v)G_{\mu \nu }^a{G}^{a\mu \nu }$, which is allowed by gauge invariance even though the gluon is massless.

There is also no kinematic obstacle: two massless particles with nonparallel momenta can have nonzero total invariant mass. In particular, head-on gluons have $\hat{s}=4E_1{E}_2$, providing the energy needed for the Higgs boson at the LHC.