Invisible decays in Higgs boson pair production

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 diHiggs 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 diHiggs production. We outline a search sensitive to such invisible decays in the bb + E T 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.

Maxi-sizing the trilinear Higgs self-coupling: how large could it be?

“…If the new degrees of freedom are very light, they can affect the Higgs-pair production process in different ways (like e.g. resonant production [53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60] or by scalar/fermionic contributions to the gluon fusion loop [61][62][63]) and the dominant effect does not need to be associated with the λ hhh coupling deviation. Hence, we focus on the case where the new physics is above the EW scale, but not necessarily yet in the EFT regime where the effects are expected to decouple rapidly.…”

“…For discussion on resonant Higgs pair production in the singlet model we refer to Refs. [53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60].…”

Multi-Higgs boson probes of the dark sector

“…Analogous signals arise in a multitude of new physics models as studied in Refs. [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. LHC searches for di-Higgs + E T have been presented in Refs.…”

Tagging Jets in Invisible Higgs Searches

“…One common structural element is the super-renormalizable Higgs mass term, which allows any singlet field to mix with the Higgs and which opens a renormalizable portal to a hidden sector [4]. This Higgs portal opens a wealth of options for model building ranging from simple dark matter models to more complicated unified models [5][6][7]. Whatever guides the exact composition of such a hidden sector, a Higgs portal would always show itself through an invisible decay width.…”