No Arabic abstract
In extended Higgs sectors that exhibit alignment without decoupling, the additional scalars are allowed to have large couplings to the Standard Model Higgs. We show that current nonresonant di-Higgs searches can be straightforwardly adapted to look for additional Higgses in these scenarios, where pair production of non-SM Higgses can be enhanced. For concreteness, we study pair production of exotic Higgses in the context of an almost inert two Higgs doublet model, where alignment is explained through an approximate $mathbb{Z}_2$ symmetry under which the additional scalars are odd. In this context, the smallness of the $mathbb Z_2$ violating parameter suppresses single production of exotic Higgses, but it does not prevent a sizeable trilinear coupling $hHH$ between the SM Higgs ($h$) and the additional states ($H$). We study the process $pprightarrow h^* rightarrow HH$ in the final states $bbar b b bar b$, $bbar bgammagamma$, and multi-leptons. We find that at the HL-LHC these modes could be sensitive to masses of the additional neutral scalars in the range $130mbox{ GeV} lesssim m_H lesssim 290mbox{ GeV}$.
In these proceedings I explore one aspect of gauge-boson physics at the LHC - Triple Gauge-boson Couplings (TGCs) in $WZ$ and Wgamma production. Methods for extracting confidence limits on anomalous TGCs are assessed, while accounting for the effects of higher order QCD corrections and contributions from other theoretical and detector related systematics. Detector response has been parametrised according to the ATLAS detectors specifications. A strategy for reporting the anomalous coupling limits is introduced which removes the ambiguities of form factors by reporting the limits as a function of a cutoff operating on the diboson system invariant mass. Techniques for measuring the energy dependence of anomalous couplings are demonstrated.
We study the tagging of Higgs exotic decay signals using different types of deep neural networks (DNNs), focusing on the $W^pm h$ associated production channel followed by Higgs decaying into $n$ $b$-quarks with $n=4$, 6 and 8. All the Higgs decay products are collected into a fat-jet, to which we apply further selection using the DNNs. Three kinds of DNNs are considered, namely convolutional neural network (CNN), recursive neural network (RecNN) and particle flow network (PFN). The PFN can achieve the best performance because its structure allows enfolding more information in addition to the four-momentums of the jet constituents, such as particle ID and tracks parameters. Using the PFN as an example, we verify that it can serve as an efficient tagger even though it is trained on a different event topology with different $b$-multiplicity from the actual signal. The projected sensitivity to the branching ratio of Higgs decaying into $n$ $b$-quarks at the HL-LHC are 10%, 3% and 1%, for $n=4$, 6 and 8, respectively.
We review the study of the charged Higgs and top quark associated production at the LHC with the presence of an additional scalar doublet. Top quark spin effects are related to the Higgs fermion couplings through this process. The angular distributions with respect to top quark spin turn out to be distinctive observables to study the $Htb$ interaction in different models.
The $h(125)$ boson, discovered only in 2012, is lower than the top quark in mass, hence $t to ch$ search commenced immediately thereafter, with current limits at the per mille level and improving. As the $t to ch$ rate vanishes with the $h$-$H$ mixing angle $cosgamma to 0$, we briefly review the collider probes of the top changing $tcH/tcA$ coupling $rho_{tc}$ of the exotic $CP$-even/odd Higgs bosons $H/A$. Together with an extra top conserving $ttH/ttA$ coupling $rho_{tt}$, one has an enhanced $cbH^+$ coupling alongside the familiar $tbH^+$ coupling, where $H^+$ is the charged Higgs boson. The main processes we advocate are $cg to tH/A to ttbar c,; ttbar t$ (same-sign top and triple-top), and $cg to bH^+ to btbar b$. We also discuss some related processes such as $cg to thh$, $tZH$ that depend on $cosgamma$ being nonzero, comment briefly on $gg to H/A to tbar t, tbar c$ resonant production, and touch upon the $rho_{tu}$ coupling.
We propose a novel kinematic method to expedite the discovery of the double Higgs ($hh$) production in the $ell^+ell^- b bar{b} + E_T hspace{-0.52cm} big / ~$ final state. We make full use of recently developed kinematic variables, as well as the variables $it Topness$ for the dominant background (top quark pair production) and $it Higgsness$ for the signal. We obtain a significant increase in sensitivity compared to the previous analyses which used sophisticated algorithms like boosted decision trees or neutral networks. The method can be easily generalized to resonant $hh$ production as well as other non-resonant channels.