2023/02/27 by Connell, Joseph M., Ferreira, Pedro, Haber, Howard E. · 1 citation
#FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2302.13697
Searches for new neutral Higgs bosons of an extended Higgs sector at the LHC can be interpreted in the framework of the two-Higgs doublet model. By employing generic flavor-aligned Higgs-fermion Yukawa couplings, we propose an analysis that uses experimental data to determine whether flavor alignment is a consequence of a symmetry that is either exact or at most softly broken. We illustrate our proposal in two different scenarios based on a few 3 sigma (local) excesses observed by the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations in their searches for heavy scalars. In Scenario 1, an excess of events is interpreted as A→ ZH→ ℓ+ℓ- bb (where ℓ=e or μ), with the CP-odd and CP-even neutral scalar masses given by mA=610 GeV and mH=290 GeV, respectively. In Scenario 2, an excess of events in the production of tt and τ+τ- final states is interpreted as decays of a CP-odd scalar of mass mA=400 GeV. Scenario 1 is consistent with Type-I Yukawa interactions, which can arise in a 2HDM subject to a softly-broken ℤ2 discrete symmetry. Scenario 2 is inconsistent with a symmetry-based flavor alignment, but can be consistent with more general flavor-aligned Higgs-fermion Yukawa couplings.