Status of invisible Higgs decays

By G. Bélanger, B. Dumont, Ulrich Ellwanger, J. Gunion, Sabine Kraml. 2013

153 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract We analyze the extent to which the LHC and Tevatron results as of the end of 2012 constrain invisible (or undetected) decays of the Higgs boson-like state at ∼ 125 GeV . To this end we perform global fits for several cases: (1) a Higgs boson with Standard Model (SM) couplings but additional invisible decay modes; (2) SM couplings to fermions and vector bosons, but allowing for additional new particles modifying the effective Higgs couplings to gluons and photons; (3) no new particles in the loops but tree-level Higgs couplings to the up-quarks, down-quarks and vector bosons, relative to the SM, treated as free parameters. We find that in the three cases invisible decay rates of 23%, 61%, 88%, respectively, are consistent with current data at 95% confidence level (CL). Limiting the coupling to vector bosons, C V , to C V ⩽ 1 in case (3) reduces the allowed invisible branching ratio to 56% at 95% CL. Requiring in addition that the Higgs couplings to quarks have the same sign as in the SM, an invisible rate of up to 36% is allowed at 95% CL. We also discuss direct probes of invisible Higgs decays, as well as the interplay with dark matter searches.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5c69d9e67a434c2828776def93716831468e3c95

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Citations in the corpus

micrOMEGAs_3: A program for calculating dark matter observables (2013, result): “Note that since in this case one DM component has disappeared completely, a signal in indirect detection is (2)This model is only illustrative and would need to include new quarks to be anomaly free, furthermore the light DM masses are incompatible with the bounds on the Higgs invisible width that c”
Probing the Standard Model with Higgs signal rates from the Tevatron, the LHC and a future ILC (2014, background): “SM-like signal rates for a Higgs boson with an increased total width can always be obtained by a simultaneous increase of the branching fraction to undetectable particles and the Higgs couplings to SM particles, if both are allowed to vary and no further assumptions are imposed [12, 13, 95].”
Global fit to Higgs signal strengths and couplings and implications for extended Higgs sectors (2013, background): “This is in contrast to the situation at the end of 2012 [45,48], where some New Physics contribution to both ∆Cg and ∆Cγ was preferred, and allowing for invisible decays had a large effect; with the higher statistics and with the reduced γγ signal strength from CMS [11], ∆Cg and ∆Cγ are now much mor”
Doubling down on naturalness with a supersymmetric twin Higgs (2013, background): “[36] because the invisible width scales similarly to the modifications of tree-level couplings, leading to a tighter constraint.”
The universal Higgs fit (2013, background): “The invisible Higgs boson decay width [116, 117] constrains Dark Matter (DM) candidates with mass below Mh/2.”
Dark nuclei. I. Cosmology and indirect detection (2014, background): “There are already strong constraints on the allowed mixing angle, and we thus assume this mixing is small, below the ∼ few% level [49–52].”