Heavy neutral scalar decays into electroweak gauge bosons in the littlest Higgs model

Abstract

We study the heavy neutral scalar decays into standard model electroweak gauge bosons in the context of the littlest Higgs model. We focus our attention on the processes induced at the one-loop level, with . Since the branching ratios of the decays are very suppressed, only the process is analyzed in the framework of possible experimental scenarios by using heavy scalar masses between 1.6 TeV and 3.3 TeV. The branching ratio for the decay is of the order of 10−3 throughout the interval , which represents the global symmetry breaking scale of the theory. Thus, the associated production cross section for is estimated, finding around ten events for at best.