No Arabic abstract
We propose leveraging our proficiency for detecting Higgs resonances by using the Higgs as a tagging object for new heavy physics. In particular, we argue that searches for exotic Higgs production from decays of color-singlet fields with electroweak charges could beat current searches at the LHC which look for their decays to vectors. As an example, we study the production and decay of vector-like leptons which admit Yukawa couplings with SM leptons. We find that bounds from Run 2 searches are consistent with anywhere from hundreds to many thousands of Higgses having been produced in their decays over the same period, depending on the representation. Dedicated searches for these signatures may thus be able to significantly improve our reach at the electroweak energy frontier.
Collisions at high-energy particle colliders are a traditionally fruitful source of exotic particle discoveries. Finding these rare particles requires solving difficult signal-versus-background classification problems, hence machine learning approaches are often used. Standard approaches have relied on `shallow machine learning models that have a limited capacity to learn complex non-linear functions of the inputs, and rely on a pain-staking search through manually constructed non-linear features. Progress on this problem has slowed, as a variety of techniques have shown equivalent performance. Recent advances in the field of deep learning make it possible to learn more complex functions and better discriminate between signal and background classes. Using benchmark datasets, we show that deep learning methods need no manually constructed inputs and yet improve the classification metric by as much as 8% over the best current approaches. This demonstrates that deep learning approaches can improve the power of collider searches for exotic particles.
We investigate the potential of LHC resonance searches in leptonic final states to probe the $Z$ in the minimal $U(1)_{B-L}$ model. Considering the current constraints on the $Z$ in terms of its mass $m_{Z}$ and the associated gauge coupling $g_{B-L}$ as well as constraints in the Higgs sector, we analyse the potential of dilepton and four lepton final states for $Z$ production. This includes Drell-Yan production, Higgs mediated decays and final state radiation processes concentrating only on the ATLAS and CMS detectors at the LHC. We show that the four-lepton final state is sensitive to $m_{Z}$ as low as 0.25 GeV. Furthermore, setting the Higgs mixing to $sinalpha = 0.3$, this final state has a strong sensitivity and it probes regions of parameter space where the $Z$ is long-lived. We demonstrate the sensitivity at the High Luminosity LHC and comment on the potential of probing displaced vertices due to long-lived $Z$. Finally, we also comment on the strength of $Z$ and Higgs mediated heavy neutrino processes by taking into account the constraints derived.
In recent years, intriguing hints for the violation of Lepton Flavour Universality (LFU) have been accumulated in semileptonic $B$ decays, both in the neutral-current transitions $bto sell^+ell^-$ (i.e., $R_K$ and $R_{K^*}$) and the charged-current transitions $bto cell^-bar u_ell$ (i.e., $R_D$, $R_{D^*}$ and $R_{J/psi}$). LHCb has reported deviations from the Standard Model (SM) expectations in $bto smu^+mu^-$ processes as well as in the ratios $R_K$ and $R_{K^*}$, which together point at New Physics (NP) affecting muons with a high significance. Furthermore, hints for LFU violation in $R_{D^{(*)}}$ and $R_{J/psi}$ point at large deviations from the SM in processes involving tau leptons. Together, these hints for NP motivate the possibility of huge LFU-violating effects in $bto stau^+tau^-$ transitions. In this article we predict the branching ratios of $Bto Ktau^+tau^-$, $Bto K^{*}tau^+tau^-$ and $B_sto phi tau^+tau^-$ taking into account NP effects in the Wilson coefficients $C_{9()}^{tautau}$ and $C_{10()}^{tautau}$. Assuming a common NP explanation of $R_{D^{}}$ , $R_{D^{(*)}}$ and $R_{J/psi}$, we show that a very large enhancement of $bto stau^+tau^-$ processes, of around three orders of magnitude compared to the SM, can be expected under fairly general assumptions. We find that the branching ratios of $B_sto tau^+tau^-$, $B_sto phi tau^+tau^-$ and $Bto K^{(*)}tau^+tau^-$ under these assumptions are in the observable range for LHCb and Belle II.
The PADME experiment is searching for the Dark Photon $A$ in the $e^{+}e^{-} to gamma A$ process, assuming a $A$ decay into invisible particles. In extended Dark Sector models, a Dark Higgs $h$ can be produced alongside $A$ in the process $e^{+}e^{-} to h A$. If the $h$ mass is greater than twice the $A$ mass the final state will be composed by three $e^{+}e^{-}$ pairs. Such extremely rare process is explorable by the PADME experiment, which could get a first measure and impose limits on models of physics beyond the Standard Model.
We explore the decays of $Bto V_1V_2$ ($V_{1,2}= (rho, omega,K^*, phi)$ and $B= (B^0, B^+,B_s)$) with transverse polarizations. We explicitly evaluate the eigenstates of T-odd scalar operators involving spins for the first time, which offer physical insight among the T violating observables. Based on the helicity suppression of tree operators for transverse polarizations in the standard model (SM), we deduce that $Delta phi_p = phi_parallel - phi_perp=0$ with $phi_{perp,parallel}$ the complex phases of the transverse amplitudes. In contrast, the experiments show that $Delta phi _p (B^0 to K^{*0} omega)= -0.84pm 0.54$, which would be a signal of new physics. There is also a discrepancy between our result in the SM and the experimental data for the transverse polarized branching ratio in $B^0 to K^{*0} omega$. In addition, by counting the helicity flips, we obtain that $sin(phi_p ) approx 0$ in $Bto V_1T_2$ with $T_2$ an arbitrary spin-$n$ meson ($nge1$).