Lepton flavor violating decay of 125 GeV Higgs boson to μτ channel and excess in tt̄H

Abstract

A recent search for the lepton flavor violating (LFV) decays of the Higgs boson, performed by CMS collaboration, reports an interesting deviation from the Standard Model (SM). The search conducted in the channel [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] shows an excess of 2.4[Formula: see text] signal events with 19.6 fb[Formula: see text] data at a center-of-mass energy [Formula: see text] = 8 TeV. On the other hand, a search performed by CMS collaboration for the SM Higgs boson produced in association with a top quark pair [Formula: see text] also showed an excess in the same-sign dimuon final state. In this work, we try to find out if these two seemingly uncorrelated excesses are related or not. Our analysis reveals that a LFV Higgs decay [Formula: see text] can partially explain the excess in the same-sign dimuon final state in the [Formula: see text] search, infact brings down the excess well within 2[Formula: see text] error of the SM expectation. Probing such non-standard Higgs boson decay is of interest and might contain hints of new physics at the electroweak scale.