Abstract
Proposals of measuring the off-shell Higgs contributions and first measurements at the LHC have electrified the Higgs phenomenology community for two reasons: firstly, probing interactions at high invariant masses and momentum transfers is intrinsically sensitive to new physics beyond the Standard Model, irrespective of a resonant or non-resonant character of a particular BSM scenario. Secondly, under specific assumptions a class of models exists for which the off-shell coupling measurement together with a measurement of the on-shell signal strength can be re-interpreted in terms of a bound on the total Higgs boson width. In this paper, we provide a first step towards a classification of the models for which a total width measurement is viable and we discuss examples of BSM models for which the off-shell coupling measurement can be important in either constraining or even discovering new physics in the upcoming LHC runs. Specifically, we discuss the quantitative impact of the presence of dimension six operators on the (de)correlation of Higgs on- and off-shell regions keeping track of all interference effects. We furthermore investigate off-shell measurements in a wider context of new (non-)resonant physics in Higgs portal scenarios and the MSSM.
Highlights
Given that the LHC machine marginalizes over a vast partonic energy range, the described effective field theory (EFT) methods are not applicable in cases (i)-(iii), for which new resonant dynamics is resolved; we cannot trust an EFT formulation in the presence of thresholds
Proposals of measuring the off-shell Higgs contributions and first measurements at the LHC have electrified the Higgs phenomenology community for two reasons: firstly, probing interactions at high invariant masses and momentum transfers is intrinsically sensitive to new physics beyond the Standard Model, irrespective of a resonant or non-resonant character of a particular BSM scenario
Under specific assumptions a class of models exists for which the off-shell coupling measurement together with a measurement of the on-shell signal strength can be re-interpreted in terms of a bound on the total Higgs boson width
Summary
The numerical calculations in this paper have been obtained with a customized version of Vbfnlo [60, 61], that employs FeynArts/FormCalc/LoopTools [62,63,64] tool chain for the full pp → ZZ → e+e−μ+μ− final state (see figure 1). We neglect QED contributions throughout; they are known to be negligible especially for the high mZZ phase space region where both Z bosons can be fully reconstructed. Our implementation is detailed in [37] and has been validated against the SM results of [29,30,31]. We include bottom quark contributions to the Higgs diagrams, these can become relevant in the MSSM at large tan β. The phase space integration has been validated against the results of [29,30,31]. Where ∆Rll′ is the angular separation between any two leptons, yl and pT,l are the lepton rapidity and transverse momentum respectively, and focus on LHC collisions at 13 TeV
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