2024/07/08 by Sumit Banik, Andreas Crivellin, Banik, Sumit +1 · 3 citations
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Electron and X-Ray Spectroscopy Techniques #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #Nuclear Theory (nucl-th) #Particle Detector Development and Performance #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2407.06267
openalex publication_date 2024/07/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Statistically significant excesses exist at around 152 GeV in associated di-photon production (γγ+X) in the sidebands of SM Higgs analyses of ATLAS (using the full run-2 dataset). They are most pronounced in the single-τ, missing-transverse-energy, four-jet and \geqslant1ℓ+ \geqslant1b-jet channels (≈3σ) and can be explained by the Drell-Yan production of new Higgs bosons, i.e. pp→ W^*→ H^± H0. We first examine the excesses in a simplified model approach, considering that H^± decays to τν, WZ or tb. Both the τν and tb decay modes individually lead to a significance of \lessapprox4σ while for WZ one can obtain at most 3.5σ. This is because the decays of WZ lead to multiple leptons contributing to the two-lepton channel which does not show an excess at 152 GeV. Next, we consider two-Higgs-doublet models where the charged Higgs does not decay to WZ at tree-level, finding a significance of \gtrapprox4σ for a branching ratio of the new neutral Higgs to photons of ≈2%. Even though this branching fraction is quite sizable, it can be obtained in composite models or via the Lagrangian term λ6 H1^† H1 H2^† H1+\rm h.c. breaking the commonly imposed Z2 symmetry.