2014/04/30 by Yi Chen, Roni Harnik, Roberto Vega-Morales · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Archaeology #Astrophysics #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Coupling (piping) #Electron #Galaxy #Higgs boson #Large Hadron Collider #Lepton #Luminosity #Neutrino Physics Research #Nuclear physics #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Photon #Physics #Physics beyond the Standard Model #Quantum mechanics #Sensitivity (control systems) #Standard Model (mathematical formulation) #hep-ex #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.113.191801
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 191801 (2014) · References updated. Published in journal
openalex publication_date 2014/11/04 · arxiv created 2014/12/15 · arxiv updated 2014/12/17 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We explore the sensitivity of the Higgs decay to four leptons, the so-called golden channel, to higher dimensional loop-induced couplings of the Higgs boson to ZZ, Z\ensuremathγ, and \ensuremathγ\ensuremathγ pairs, allowing for general CP mixtures. The larger standard model tree level coupling hZ^\ensuremathμZ_\ensuremathμ is the dominant ``background'' for the loop-induced couplings. However, this large background interferes with the smaller loop-induced couplings, enhancing the sensitivity. We perform a maximum likelihood analysis based on analytic expressions of the fully differential decay width for h\ensuremath→4\ensuremathℓ (4\ensuremathℓ\ensuremath≡2e2\ensuremathμ,4e,4\ensuremathμ), including all interference effects. We find that the spectral shapes induced by Higgs couplings to photons are particularly different than the hZ^\ensuremathμZ_\ensuremathμ background leading to enhanced sensitivity to these couplings. We show that even if the h\ensuremath→\ensuremathγ\ensuremathγ and h\ensuremath→4\ensuremathℓ rates agree with that predicted by the standard model, the golden channel has the potential to probe both the CP nature as well as the overall sign of the Higgs coupling to photons well before the end of a high-luminosity LHC.