Precise predictions for the Higgs-boson decay H ---> WW/ZZ ---> 4 leptons

By A. Bredenstein, Ansgar Denner, Stefan Dittmaier, M. Weber. 2006

387 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The decay of the standard model Higgs boson into four leptons via a virtual $W$- or $Z$-boson pair is one of the most important decay modes in the Higgs-boson search at the Large Hadron Collider. We present the complete electroweak radiative corrections of $\mathcal{O}(\ensuremath{\alpha})$ to these processes, including improvements beyond $\mathcal{O}(\ensuremath{\alpha})$ originating from heavy-Higgs effects and final-state radiation. The intermediate $W$- and $Z$-boson resonances are described (without any expansion or on-shell approximation) by consistently employing complex mass parameters for the gauge bosons (complex-mass scheme). The corrections to partial decay widths typically amount to some percent and increase with growing Higgs mass ${M}_{H}$, reaching about 8% at ${M}_{H}\ensuremath{\sim}500\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{GeV}$. For not too large Higgs masses (${M}_{H}\ensuremath{\lesssim}400\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{GeV}$) the corrections to the partial decay widths can be reproduced within $\ensuremath{\lesssim}2%$ by simple approximations. For angular distributions the corrections are somewhat larger and distort the shapes. For invariant-mass distributions of fermion pairs they can reach several tens of percent depending on the treatment of photon radiation. The discussed corrections have been implemented in a Monte Carlo event generator called Prophecy4f.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/67e202c8437b280583c11179a8295c20d66682d1

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Citations in the corpus

Les Houches 2013: Physics at TeV Colliders: Standard Model Working Group Report (2014, methodology): “The complex-mass scheme, first used for four-fermion production in e+e− physics [192], 24 is frequently used in NLO calculations for weak gauge-boson or Higgs-boson processes at the LHC, for example for the off-shell Higgs-boson decays H →WW/ZZ → 4 fermions at NLO accuracy in the Monte Carlo program”
Emergence of the electroweak scale through the Higgs portal (2013, background): “Note, that already the SM Higgs decay width is quite small, ΓSM(mh ' 125 GeV) ' 4 MeV [41, 42] and decreases more or less linearly (until the bottom threshold is crossed) with the mass.”
Inadequacy of zero-width approximation for a light Higgs boson signal (2012, neutral): “[52, 53].”
Measurements of the Higgs boson production and decay rates and coupling strengths using pp collision data at \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\o (2015, neutral): “cay [77,78] and Prophecy4f [79,80] programs, compiled in Ref.”
Handbook of LHC Higgs Cross Sections: 3. Higgs Properties (2013, neutral): “[20] where additional discussions can be found.”