No Arabic abstract
We show that the standard model (SM)-like Higgs boson may decay into neutrinos with a sizable decay branching ratio in one well-known two Higgs doublet model, so-called neutrinophilic Higgs model. This could happen if the mass of the lighter extra neutral Higgs boson is smaller than one half of the SM-like Higgs boson mass. The definite prediction of this scenario is that the rate of the SM-like Higgs boson decay into diphoton normalized by the SM value is about 0.9. In the case that a neutrino is Majorana particle, a displaced vertex of right-handed neutrino decay would be additionally observed. This example indicates that a large invisible Higgs boson decay could be irrelevant to dark matter.
The existence of dark matter has been established in astrophysics. However, there is no candidate for DM in the Stand Model (SM). In SM, the Higgs boson can only decay invisibly via $Hrightarrow ZZ^ast rightarrow ubar{ u} ubar{ u}$ or DM, so any evidence of invisible Higgs decay that exceeds BR (H$rightarrow$inv.) will immediately point to a phenomenon that is beyond the standard model (BSM). In this paper, we report on the upper limit of BR (H$rightarrow$invisible) estimated for three channels, including two leptonic channels and one hadronic channel, under the assumption predicted by SM. With the SM ZH production rate, the upper limit of BR (H$rightarrow$inv.) could reach 0.24% at the 95% confidence level.
We study the Higgs boson $(h)$ decay to two light jets at the 14 TeV High-Luminosity-LHC (HL-LHC), where a light jet ($j$) represents any non-flavor tagged jet from the observational point of view. The decay mode $hto gg$ is chosen as the benchmark since it is the dominant channel in the Standard Model (SM), but the bound obtained is also applicable to the light quarks $(j=u,d,s)$. We estimate the achievable bounds on the decay branching fractions through the associated production $Vh (V=W^pm,Z)$. Events of the Higgs boson decaying into heavy (tagged) or light (un-tagged) jets are correlatively analyzed. We find that with 3000 fb$^{-1}$ data at the HL-LHC, we should expect approximately $1sigma$ statistical significance on the SM $Vh(gg)$ signal in this channel. This corresponds to a reachable upper bound ${rm BR}(hto jj) leq 4~ {rm BR}^{SM}(hto gg)$ at $95%$ confidence level. A consistency fit also leads to an upper bound ${rm BR}(hto cc) < 15~ {rm BR}^{SM}(hto cc)$ at $95%$ confidence level. The estimated bound may be further strengthened by adopting multiple variable analyses, or adding other production channels.
We derive the second-order QCD corrections to the production of a Higgs boson recoiling against a parton with finite transverse momentum, working in the effective field theory in which the top quark contributions are integrated out. To account for quark mass effects, we supplement the effective field theory result by the full quark mass dependence at leading order. Our calculation is fully differential in the final state kinematics and includes the decay of the Higgs boson to a photon pair. It allows one to make next-to-next-to- leading order (NNLO)-accurate theory predictions for Higgs-plus-jet final states and for the transverse momentum distribution of the Higgs boson, accounting for the experimental definition of the fiducial cross sections. The NNLO QCD corrections are found to be moderate and positive, they lead to a substantial reduction of the theory uncertainty on the predictions. We compare our results to 8 TeV LHC data from ATLAS and CMS. While the shape of the data is well-described for both experiments, we agree on the normalization only for CMS. By normalizing data and theory to the inclusive fiducial cross section for Higgs production, good agreement is found for both experiments, however at the expense of an increased theory uncertainty. We make predictions for Higgs production observables at the 13 TeV LHC, which are in good agreement with recent ATLAS data. At this energy, the leading order mass corrections to the effective field theory prediction become significant at large transverse momenta, and we discuss the resulting uncertainties on the predictions.
We investigate the impact of the latest data on Higgs boson branching ratios on the minimal model with a Universal Extra Dimension (mUED). Combining constraints from vacuum stability requirements with these branching ratio measurements we are able to make realistic predictions for the signal strengths in this model. We use these to find a lower bound of 1.3 TeV on the size parameter $R^{-1}$ of the model at 95% confidence level, which is far more stringent than any other reliable bound obtained till now.
The Higgs invisible decay width may soon become a powerful tool to probe extensions of the Standard Model with dark matter candidates at the Large Hadron Collider. In this work, we calculate the next-to-leading order (NLO) electroweak corrections to the 125 GeV Higgs decay width into two dark matter particles. The model is the next-to-minimal 2-Higgs-doublet model (N2HDM) in the dark doublet phase, that is, only one doublet and the singlet acquire vacuum expectation values. We show that the present measurement of the Higgs invisible branching ratio, BR$(H to$ invisible $< 0.11$), does not lead to constraints on the parameter space of the model at leading order. This is due to the very precise measurements of the Higgs couplings but could change in the near future. Furthermore, if NLO corrections are required not to be unphysically large, no limits on the parameter space can be extracted from the NLO results.