No Arabic abstract
After the discovery of a scalar resonance, resembling the Higgs boson, its couplings have been extensively studied via the measurement of various production and decay channels on the invariant mass peak. Recently, it has been suggested the possibility to use off-shell measurements: in particular, CMS has published results based on the high- invariant mass cross section of the process $gg to ZZ$, which contains the contribution of the Higgs. While this measurement has been interpreted as a constraint on the Higgs width after very specific assumptions are taken on the Higgs couplings, in this letter we show that a much more model-independent interpretation is possible.
The measured properties of the recently discovered Higgs boson are in good agreement with predictions from the Standard Model. However, small deviations in the Higgs couplings may manifest themselves once the currently large uncertainties will be improved as part of the LHC program and at a future Higgs factory. We review typical new physics scenarios that lead to observable modifications of the Higgs interactions. They can be divided into two broad categories: mixing effects as in portal models or extended Higgs sectors, and vertex loop effects from new matter or gauge fields. In each model we relate coupling deviations to their effective new physics scale. It turns out that with percent level precision the Higgs couplings will be sensitive to the multi-TeV regime.
Off-shell Higgs at the high mass tail may shed light on the underlying mechanism of the electroweak symmetry breaking. Due to the large cancellation in the standard model (SM) between the box and Higgs-mediated triangle diagrams, the $ggto WW(ZZ)$ process in the SM is dominated by the $V_T V_T$ transverse-mode at the high mass tail. The cancellation does not necessarily hold, when there is a sufficiently large new physics contribution resulting in $V_LV_L$ longitudinal mode, which is commonly the case when the Higgs sector is modified. Thus the $V_LV_L$ final states in the high mass tail can be utilized as a sensitive probe for such models. In the paper we focus on a study of the $gg to ZZ$ process in the fully leptonic decay modes, proposing to utilize the polarization modes of the off-shell Higgs to probe new physics, whose contribution mainly shows in the longitudinal mode. As examples, we analyze three different Higgs sector new physics cases (Higgs portal with a light scalar, a broad-width scalar that mixes with the Higgs, and quantum critical Higgs models), and demonstrate that the angular information relating to the polarization serves as very sensitive probe for such new physics.
We consider the Higgs boson decay processes and its production and provide a parameterisation tailored for testing models of new physics. The choice of a particular parameterisation depends on a non-obvious balance of quantity and quality of the available experimental data, envisaged purpose for the parameterisation and degree of model independence. At present only simple parameterisations with a limited number of fit parameters can be performed, but this situation will improve with the forthcoming experimental LHC data. It is therefore important that different approaches are considered and that the most detailed information is made available to allow testing the different aspects of the Higgs boson physics and the possible hints beyond the Standard Model.
Lilith is a public Python library for constraining new physics from Higgs signal strength measurements. Version 2.0 of Lilith comes with an extensive XML database which includes the ATLAS and CMS Run 2 Higgs results for 36/fb, in addition the the Run 1 results. Both the code and the database were extended from the ordinary Gaussian approximation employed in Lilith-1.1 to using variable Gaussian and Poisson likelihoods. Moreover, Lilith-2 can make use of correlation matrices of arbitrary dimension. We will report on these novelties and ongoing developments. The importance of how correlations and uncertainties are treated will be demonstrated by means of detailed validations of the implemented experimental results. Moreover, we show the effects for global fits of reduced Higgs couplings, 2HDMs of Type I and Type II, and invisible Higgs decays. The program is publicly available on GitHub and can be used to constrain a wide class of new physics scenarios.
The properties of the observed Higgs boson with mass around 125 GeV are constrained by a wealth of experimental results targeting different combinations for the production and decay of a Higgs boson. In order to assess the compatibility of a non-Standard Model-like Higgs boson with all available results, we present Lilith, a new public tool that makes use of signal strength measurements performed at the LHC and the Tevatron.