Invisible decays in Higgs boson pair production

Abstract

Observation of Higgs pair production is an important long term objective of the LHC physics program as it will shed light on the scalar potential of the Higgs field and the nature of electroweak symmetry breaking. While numerous studies have examined the impact of new physics on di-Higgs production, little attention has been given to the well-motivated possibility of exotic Higgs decays in this channel. Here we investigate the consequences of exotic invisible Higgs decays in di-Higgs production. We outline a search sensitive to such invisible decays in the $b\bar b+{\not \!\! E}_T$ channel. We demonstrate that probing invisible branching ratios of order 10$\%$ during the LHC's high-luminosity run will be challenging, but in resonance enhanced di-Higgs production, this final state can become crucial to establish the existence of physics beyond the Standard Model at collider energies. We also briefly discuss the outlook for other exotic Higgs decay modes and the potential to observe such exotic decays in the di-Higgs channel.