2011/12/31 by Bogdan A. Dobrescu, Graham D. Kribs, A. Martin +1 · 3 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Boson #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Gluon #Higgs boson #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Large Hadron Collider #Nuclear physics #Observable #Octet #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Quark #Scalar (mathematics) #Scalar boson #hep-ex #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.85.074031
8 pages, 9 figures. Minor improvements made and references added
arxiv created 2012/01/03 · openalex publication_date 2012/04/27 · arxiv updated 2013/05/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We show that production of the Higgs boson through gluon-fusion may be suppressed in the presence of colored scalars. Substantial destructive interference between the top-quark diagrams and colored scalar diagrams is possible due to cancellations between the real (and also imaginary) parts of the amplitudes. As an example, we consider a color-octet scalar that has a negative, order-one coupling to the Higgs doublet. We find that gluon fusion can be suppressed by more than an order of magnitude when the scalar mass is below a few hundred GeV, while milder suppressions occur for larger scalar masses or smaller couplings. Thus, the standard model extended with only one particle can evade the full range of present LHC exclusion limits on the Higgs mass. The colored scalars, however, would be produced in pairs with a large rate at the LHC, leading to multijet final states to which the LHC experiments are now becoming sensitive.