Abstract
A generalisation of the narrow-width approximation (NWA) is formulated which allows for a consistent treatment of interference effects between nearly mass-degenerate particles in the factorisation of a more complicated process into production and decay parts. It is demonstrated that interference effects of this kind arising in BSM models can be very large, leading to drastic modifications of predictions based on the standard NWA. The application of the generalised NWA is demonstrated both at tree level and at one-loop order for an example process where the neutral Higgs bosons h and H of the MSSM are produced in the decay of a heavy neutralino and subsequently decay into a fermion pair. The generalised NWA, based on on-shell matrix elements or their approximations leading to simple weight factors, is shown to produce UV- and IR-finite results which are numerically close to the result of the full process at tree level and at one-loop order, where an agreement of better than 1,% is found for the considered process. The most accurate prediction for this process based on the generalised NWA, taking into account also corrections that are formally of higher orders, is briefly discussed.
Highlights
The generalised narrow-width approximation (NWA), based on on-shell matrix elements or their approximations leading to simple weight factors, is shown to produce UV- and IR-finite results which are numerically close to the result of the full process at tree level and at one-loop order, where an agreement of better than 1 % is found for the considered process
Motivated by the good performance of the generalised NWA (gNWA) at the tree level, we investigate the application of the generalised narrow-width approximation at the loop level by incorporating 1-loop corrections of the production and decay part into the predictions
We have developed a generalisation of the standard narrow-width approximation that extends the applicability of this important tool to scenarios where interference effects between nearly mass-degenerate particles are important
Summary
The narrow-width approximation is a useful way to simplify the calculation of complicated processes involving the resonant contribution of an unstable particle. The production and decay are calculated independently, the spin of an intermediate particle can be taken into account by means of spin correlations [30,31] giving rise to spin–density matrices. While we do not consider the non-zero spin case explicitly, the formalism of spin–density matrices should be applicable to the gNWA discussed below in the same way as for the sNWA
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