Production and Hadronic Decays of Higgs Bosons in Heavy-Ion Collisions

Abstract

We examine Higgs boson production and decay in heavy-ion collisions at the LHC and future colliders. Owing to the long lifetime of the Higgs boson, its hadronic decays may experience little or no screening from the hot and dense quark-gluon plasma whereas jets from hard scattering processes and from decays of the electro-weak gauge bosons and the top-quark suffer significant energy loss. This distinction can lead to enhanced signal to background ratios in hadronic decay channels and thus, for example, provide alternative ways to probe the Yukawa coupling of the Higgs boson to the bottom quark and its lifetime.

Quenching of jets tagged with $W$ bosons in high-energy nuclear collisions

“…In addition, jets associated with a gauge boson are dominated by quark jets, which can help constrain the flavor dependence of parton energy loss. Recently γ/Z -jet correlations [31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47], and H+jet processes [48,49] have already been investigated within several theoretical models and by experiments in Pb+Pb collisions at √ s = 5.02 TeV. In this paper, we perform a first quantitative study of W +jets in high-energy heavy-ion collisions.…”

Thermal width of the Higgs boson in hot QCD matter

“…In this paper we derive the thermal correction δΓ H of the width of the Higgs boson to first order in the strong coupling constant α s and for temperatures T of the QCD plasma that are parametrically lower than the Higgs mass, M H ≫ T . We do so since we could not find an explicit expression for δΓ H in the literature when discussing the (im)possibility of observing thermal corrections to Higgs branching ratios at future multi-TeV heavy ion collider experiments [1][2][3]. As we explain below, δΓ H can be obtained essentially from combining limiting cases of several spectral functions whose derivation has been described in detail [4][5][6].…”