No Arabic abstract
A common lore has arisen that beyond the Standard Model (BSM) particles, which can be searched for at current and proposed experiments, should have flavorless or mostly third-generation interactions with Standard Model quarks. This theoretical bias severely limits the exploration of BSM phenomenology, and is especially constraining for extended Higgs sectors. Such limitations can be avoided in the context of Spontaneous Flavor Violation (SFV), a robust and UV complete framework that allows for significant couplings to any up or down-type quark, while suppressing flavor-changing neutral currents via flavor alignment. In this work we study the theory and phenomenology of extended SFV Higgs sectors with large couplings to any quark generation. We perform a comprehensive analysis of flavor and collider constraints of extended SFV Higgs sectors, and demonstrate that new Higgs bosons with large couplings to the light quarks may be found at the electroweak scale. In particular, we find that new Higgses as light as 100 GeV with order $sim$ 0.1 couplings to first or second generation quarks, which are copiously produced at LHC via quark fusion, are allowed by current constraints. Furthermore, the additional SFV Higgses can mix with the SM Higgs, providing strong theory motivation for an experimental program looking for deviations in the light quark-Higgs couplings. Our work demonstrates the importance of exploring BSM physics coupled preferentially to light quarks, and the need to further develop dedicated experimental techniques for the LHC and future colliders.
Higgs production in association with a photon at hadron colliders is a rare process, not yet observed at the LHC. We show that this process is sensitive to significant deviations of Higgs couplings to first and second generation SM quarks (particularly the up-type) from their SM values, and use a multivariate neural network analysis to derive the prospects of the High Luminosity LHC to probe deviations in the up and charm Higgs Yukawa couplings through $h + gamma$ production.
We suggest that the exclusive Higgs + light (or b)-jet production at the LHC, $pp to h+j(j_b)$, is a rather sensitive probe of the light-quarks Yukawa couplings and of other forms of new physics (NP) in the Higgs-gluon $hgg$ and quark-gluon $qqg$ interactions. We study the Higgs $p_T$-distribution in $pp to h+j(j_b) to gamma gamma + j(j_b)$, i.e., in $h+j(j_b)$ production followed by the Higgs decay $h to gamma gamma$, employing the ($p_T$-dependent) signal strength formalism to probe various types of NP which are relevant to these processes and which we parameterize either as scaled Standard Model (SM) couplings (the kappa-framework) and/or through new higher dimensional effective operators (the SMEFT framework). We find that the exclusive $h+j(j_b)$ production at the 13 TeV LHC is sensitive to various NP scenarios, with typical scales ranging from a few TeV to ${cal O}(10)$ TeV, depending on the flavor, chirality and Lorentz structure of the underlying physics.
We study the prospects for constraining the Higgs bosons couplings to up and down quarks using kinematic distributions in Higgs production at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. We find that the Higgs $p_T$ distribution can be used to constrain these couplings with precision competitive to other proposed techniques. With 3000 fb$^{-1}$ of data at 13 TeV in the four-lepton decay channel, we find $-0.73 lesssim bar{kappa}_u lesssim 0.33$ and $-0.88 lesssim bar{kappa}_d lesssim 0.32$, where $bar{kappa}_q = (m_q/m_b) kappa_q$ is a scaling factor that modifies the $q$ quark Yukawa coupling relative to the Standard Model bottom quark Yukawa coupling. The sensitivity may be improved by including additional Higgs decay channels.
We propose that natural TeV-scale new physics (NP) with ${cal O}(1)$ couplings to the standard model (SM) quarks may lead to a universal enhancement of the Yukawa couplings of all the light quarks, perhaps to a size comparable to that of the SM b-quark Yukawa coupling, i.e., $y_q sim {cal O}(y_b^{SM})$ for $q=u,d,c,s$. This scenario is described within an effective field theory (EFT) extension of the SM, for which a potential contribution of certain dimension six effective operators to the light quarks Yukawa couplings is $y_q sim {cal O} left( f frac{v^2}{Lambda^2} right)$, where $v$ is the Higgs vacuum expectation value (VEV), $v=246$ GeV, $Lambda$ is the typical scale of the underlying heavy NP and $f$ is the corresponding Wilson coefficient which depends on its properties and details. In particular, we study the case of $y_q sim 0.025 sim y_b^{SM}$, which is the typical size of the enhanced light-quark Yukawa couplings if the NP scale is around $Lambda sim 1.5$ TeV and the NP couplings are natural, i.e., $f sim {cal O}(1)$. We also explore this enhanced light quarks Yukawa paradigm in extensions of the SM which contain TeV-scale vector-like quarks and we match them to the specific higher dimensional effective operators in the EFT description. We discuss the constraints on this scenario and the flavor structure of the underlying NP dynamics and suggest some resulting smoking gun signals that should be searched for at the LHC, such as multi-Higgs production $pp to hh,hhh$ and single Higgs production in association with a high $p_T$ jet ($j$) or photon $pp to hj,h gamma$ and with a single top-quark $pp to h t$.
We determine the model-independent component of the couplings of axions to electroweak gauge bosons, induced by the minimal coupling to QCD inherent to solving the strong CP problem. The case of the invisible QCD axion is developed first, and the impact on $W$ and $Z$ axion couplings is discussed. The analysis is extended next to the generic framework of heavy true axions and low axion scales, corresponding to scenarios with enlarged confining sector. The mass dependence of the coupling of heavy axions to photons, $W$ and $Z$ bosons is determined. Furthermore, we perform a two-coupling-at-a-time phenomenological study where the gluonic coupling together with individual gauge boson couplings are considered. In this way, the regions excluded by experimental data for the axion-$WW$, axion-$ZZ$ and axion-$Zgamma$ couplings are determined and analyzed together with the usual photonic ones. The phenomenological results apply as well to ALPs which have anomalous couplings to both QCD and the electroweak bosons.