Invisible decays in Higgs boson pair production

Banerjee, Shankha; Batell, Brian; Spannowsky, Michael

Abstract

Observation of Higgs pair production is an important long term objective of the LHC physics program as it will shed light on the scalar potential of the Higgs field and the nature of electroweak symmetry breaking. While numerous studies have examined the impact of new physics on di-Higgs production, little attention has been given to the well-motivated possibility of exotic Higgs decays in this channel. Here we investigate the consequences of exotic invisible Higgs decays in di-Higgs production. We outline a search sensitive to such invisible decays in the bb¯+/ET channel. We demonstrate that probing invisible branching ratios of order 10% during the LHC's high-luminosity run will be challenging, but in resonance enhanced di-Higgs production, this final state can become crucial to establish the existence of physics beyond the Standard Model at collider energies. We also briefly discuss the outlook for other exotic Higgs decay modes and the potential to observe such exotic decays in the di-Higgs channel.

Citation

Banerjee, S., Batell, B., & Spannowsky, M. (2017). Invisible decays in Higgs boson pair production. Physical Review D, 95(3), Article 035009. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.95.035009

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Oct 10, 2016
• Online Publication Date: Feb 8, 2017
• Publication Date: Feb 8, 2017
• Deposit Date: Jul 26, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 26, 2017
• Journal: Physical Review D
• Print ISSN: 2470-0010
• Electronic ISSN: 2470-0029
• Publisher: American Physical Society
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 95
• Issue: 3
• Article Number: 035009
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.95.035009
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1350872