Les Houches

Heavy Higgs Searches: H → A A → 4b, 2b 2tau

Contact: Caterina Vernieri, Jose Miguel No

People Interested: Stefania Gori, Ken Mimasu, Daniele Barducci, Ramona Groeber, Stefan Liebler, Haiying Cai, Jérémie Quevillon, Alexandra Carvalho, José Zurita

In extensions of the SM Higgs sector (and more generally) the dominant decay modes of heavy Higgses may not be the “traditional” ones (VV, tt, bb), but instead H → X1 X1, H → X1 X2 and/or H → X1 SM (with X1, X2 being BSM states, e.g. new scalars/pseudoscalars). Depending on the dominant decay of X1, X2, these could constitute the discovery mode for both H and X1,X2.

A concrete example is H → A A → 4 b, which can be viewed as a generalization of resonant di-Higgs searches in the 4 b final state leaving the mass of the A state free.

Boost parametrization wrt the ratio of resonance masses (formula 5) https://arxiv.org/pdf/1303.6636.pdf

This project constitutes a feasibility study of this channel in the mH, mA (+ Width_H) parameter space. As a starting point, we want to assess the extent to which we can build up on information included in the 4b di-Higgs analyses by CMS (4b CMS 8 TeV, 4b CMS 13 TeV ) and ATLAS.

An additional final state which would be very interesting to look at in this context is 2b 2tau (for resonant di-Higgs searches, 2b 2tau becomes more sensitive for mH <~ 400 GeV).