Flavor violating Higgs decays

By R. Harnik, Joachim Kopp, Jure Zupan. 2012

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A bstractWe study a class of nonstandard interactions of the newly discovered 125 GeV Higgs-like resonance that are especially interesting probes of new physics: flavor violating Higgs couplings to leptons and quarks. These interaction can arise in many frameworks of new physics at the electroweak scale such as two Higgs doublet models, extra dimensions, or models of compositeness. We rederive constraints on flavor violating Higgs couplings using data on rare decays, electric and magnetic dipole moments, and meson oscillations. We confirm that flavor violating Higgs boson decays to leptons can be sizeable with, e.g., h → τμ and h → τe branching ratios of $ \mathcal{O} $(10%) perfectly allowed by low energy constraints. We estimate the current LHC limits on h → τμ and h → τe decays by recasting existing searches for the SM Higgs in the ττ channel and find that these bounds are already stronger than those from rare tau decays. We also show that these limits can be improved significantly with dedicated searches and we outline a possible search strategy. Flavor violating Higgs decays therefore present an opportunity for discovery of new physics which in some cases may be easier to access experimentally than flavor conserving deviations from the Standard Model Higgs framework.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a197ab2084a2552acdbbfd092180c4c8122cb7d4

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

Constraints on CP-violating Higgs couplings to the third generation (2013, background): “Note that there could also be other contributions to the EDMs beyond the ones we discuss, for instance from complex flavor-violating couplings of the Higgs with the corresponding bounds given in [19–23].”
Renormalization group evolution of the Standard Model dimension six operators III: gauge coupling dependence and phenomenology (2013, neutral): “[74, 75].”
Higgs Physics at the HL-LHC and HE-LHC (2019, background): “Moreover, the Higgs flavor violating couplings are strongly constrained by meson mixing [628, 627].”
Physics case for an LHCb Upgrade II - Opportunities in flavour physics, and beyond, in the HL-LHC era (2018, background): “For different models, not excluded by the current experimental constraints, the expected branching fraction for the LFV process B0 s→ τ±μ∓ is in the range 10−9−10−4 [269, 270,273,279–288].”
Vector-like leptons: Higgs decays and collider phenomenology (2013, background): “Although no official limits on the branching fractions exist at this moment, a recast of the h → ττ search results allows one to place limits on Br(h → τe/μ) at the level of 10% [14].”
Renormalization group evolution of the Standard Model dimension six operators II: Yukawa dependence (2013, background): “ﬃcients, need not be suppressed by SM Yukawa couplings, and could be phenomenologically interesting. For some recent phenomenological studies of bounds on such Higgs related ﬂavor violation, see Refs.[14, 15]. The lepton dipole operators also get contributions from ψ4 operators, C˙ eW rs = −2g2NcC (”
Opportunities in Flavour Physics at the HL-LHC and HE-LHC (2018, background): “The flavour violating Yukawa couplings are well constrained by the low-energy flavour-changing neutral current measurements [1344,1345,1371].”
Charged Lepton Flavour Violation: An Experimental and Theoretical Introduction (2017, methodology): “A rather model-independent parametrisation of Higgs-induced CLFV effects is the following [86, 87, 88, 89]:”
Physics at a 100 TeV pp collider: Higgs and EW symmetry breaking studies (2016, background): “In view of the very strong indirect bounds on flavor off-diagonal Higgs couplings to light quarks [174], the flavor-violating decays H → V γ are bound to be very strongly suppressed.”