Higgs Physics

The implications of the discovery of a scalar Higgs boson at the LHC with a mass of approximately 125 GeV are summarised in the context of the Standard Model of particle physics with its unique scalar boson and of its most celebrated new physics extension, the minimal supersymmetric Standard Model or MSSM, in which the Higgs sector is extended to contain three neutral and two charged scalar bosons. Discussed are the implications from the measured mass, the production and decay rates of the observed particle and, in the MSSM, from the constraints in the search for the heavier Higgs states. The perspectives for Higgs and new physics searches at the next LHC upgrades as well as at future hadron and lepton colliders are then briefly summarized.

Implications of the Higgs discovery for the MSSM

The implications of the discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC with a mass of approximately 125 GeV are summarised in the context of the minimal supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model, the MSSM. Discussed are the implications from the measured mass and production/decay rates of the observed particle and from the constraints in the search for the heavier Higgs states at the LHC.

The couplings of the Higgs boson and its CP properties from fits of the signal strengths and their ratios at the 7+8 TeV LHC

Using the full set of the LHC Higgs data from the runs at 7 and 8 TeV center of mass energies that have been released by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations, we determine the couplings of the Higgs particle to fermions and gauge bosons as well as its parity or CP composition. We consider ratios of production cross sections times decay branching fractions in which the theoretical (and some experimental) uncertainties as well as as some ambiguities from new physics cancel out. A fit of both the signal strengths in the various search channels that have been conducted, H -> Z Z, W W, gamma gamma, tau tau and b b, and their ratios shows that the observed ~126 GeV particle has couplings to fermions and gauge bosons that are Standard Model-like already at the 68% confidence level (CL). From the signal strengths in which the theoretical uncertainty is taken to be a bias, the particle is shown to be at most 68% CP-odd at the 99%CL and the possibility that it is a pure pseudoscalar state is excluded at the 4 sigma level when including both the experimental and theoretical uncertainties. The signal strengths also measure the invisible Higgs decay width which, with the same type of uncertainty analysis, is shown to be Gamma_H^inv / Gamma_H^SM < 0.52 at the 68%CL.

Precision Higgs coupling measurements at the LHC through ratios of production cross sections

Now that the Higgs particle has been observed by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC, the next endeavour would be to probe its fundamental properties and to measure its couplings to fermions and gauge bosons with the highest possible accuracy. However, the measurements will be limited by significant theoretical uncertainties that affect the production cross section in the main production channels as well as by experimental systematical errors. Following earlier work, we propose in this paper to consider ratios of Higgs production cross sections times decay branching ratios in which most of the theoretical uncertainties and some systematical errors, such as the ones due to the luminosity measurement and the Higgs decay branching fractions, cancel out. The couplings of the Higgs particle could be then probed in a way that will be mostly limited by the statistical accuracy achievable at the LHC and accuracies at the percent level are foreseen for some of the ratios at the end of the LHC run. At the theoretical level, these ratios are also interesting as they do not involve the ambiguities that affect the Higgs total decay width in new physics scenarios. To illustrate how these ratios can be used to determine the Higgs couplings, we perform a rough analysis of the recent ATLAS and CMS data which shows that there is presently no significant deviation from the Standard Model expectation.

Higgs Physics: Theory

I review the theoretical aspects of the physics of Higgs bosons, focusing on the elements that are relevant for the production and detection at present hadron colliders. After briefly summarizing the basics of electroweak symmetry breaking in the Standard Model, I discuss Higgs production at the LHC and at the Tevatron, with some focus on the main production mechanism, the gluon-gluon fusion process, and summarize the main Higgs decay modes and the experimental detection channels. I then briefly survey the case of the minimal supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model. In a last section, I review the prospects for determining the fundamental properties of the Higgs particles once they have been experimentally observed.

The MSSM with heavy scalars

We perform a comprehensive analysis of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) in the scenario where the scalar partners of the fermions and the Higgs particles (except for the Standard-Model-like one) are assumed to be very heavy and are removed from the low-energy spectrum. We first summarize our determination of the mass spectrum, in which we include the one-loop radiative corrections and resum to all orders the leading logarithms of the large scalar masses, and describe the implementation of these features in the FORTRAN code SuSpect which calculates the masses and couplings of the MSSM particles. We then study in detail the phenomenology of the model in scenarios where the gaugino mass parameters are non-universal at the GUT scale, which leads to very interesting features that are not present in the widely studied case of universal gaugino mass parameters. We discuss the constraints from collider searches and high-precision measurements, the cosmological constraints on the relic abundance of the neutralino candidate for the Dark Matter in the Universe - where new and interesting channels for neutralino annihilation appear - and the gluino lifetime. We then analyze, in the case of non-universal gaugino masses, the decays of the Higgs boson (in particular decays into and contributions of SUSY particles), of charginos and neutralinos (in particular decays into Higgs bosons and photons) and of gluinos, and highlight the differences from the case of universal gaugino masses.

The Higgs sector of supersymmetric theories and the implications for high-energy colliders

One of the main motivations for low energy supersymmetric theories is their ability to address the hierarchy and naturalness problems in the Higgs sector of the Standard Model. In these theories, at least two doublets of scalar fields are required to break the electroweak symmetry and to generate the masses of the elementary particles, resulting in a rather rich Higgs spectrum. The search for the Higgs bosons of Supersymmetry and the determination of their basic properties is one of the major goals of high--energy colliders and, in particular, the LHC which will soon start operation. We review the salient features of the Higgs sector of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model and of some of its extensions and summarize the prospects for probing them at the LHC and at the future ILC.