Effective Yukawa couplings and flavor-changing Higgs boson decays at linear colliders

Abstract

We analyze the advantages of a linear-collider program for testing a recent theoretical proposal where the Higgs-boson Yukawa couplings are radiatively generated, keeping unchanged the standard-model mechanism for electroweak-gauge-symmetry breaking. Fermion masses arise at a large energy scale through an unknown mechanism, and the standard model at the electroweak scale is regarded as an effective field theory. In this scenario, Higgs boson decays into photons and electroweak gauge-boson pairs are considerably enhanced for a light Higgs boson, which makes a signal observation at the LHC straightforward. On the other hand, the clean environment of a linear collider is required to directly probe the radiative fermionic sector of the Higgs boson couplings. Also, we show that the flavor-changing Higgs-boson decays are dramatically enhanced with respect to the standard model. In particular, we find a measurable branching ratio in the range (10^{-4}-10^{-3}) for the decay H\to bs for a Higgs boson lighter than 140 GeV, depending on the high-energy scale where Yukawa couplings vanish. We present a detailed analysis of the Higgs boson production cross sections at linear colliders for interesting decay signatures, as well as branching-ratio correlations for different flavor-conserving/nonconserving fermionic decays.