Production and Hadronic Decays of Higgs Bosons in Heavy-Ion Collisions.

Edmond L Berger,Hao Zhang,Adil Jueid,Jun Gao

doi:10.1103/physrevlett.122.041803

Abstract

We examine Higgs boson production and decay in heavy-ion collisions at the LHC and future colliders. Owing to the long lifetime of the Higgs boson, its hadronic decays may experience little or no screening from the hot and dense quark-gluon plasma, whereas jets from hard scattering processes and from decays of the electroweak gauge bosons and the top quark suffer significant energy loss. This distinction can lead to enhanced signal to background ratios in hadronic decay channels and thus, for example, provide alternative ways to probe the Yukawa coupling of the Higgs boson to the bottom quark and its lifetime.

Highlights

We examine Higgs boson production and decay in heavy-ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and future colliders
The consequences include the following. (i) Particles from Higgs decay, which do not travel in the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), will carry information on the Higgs boson. (ii) Because the strong backgrounds are reshaped by the QGP medium while the signal is nearly unchanged, the phenomenology of Higgs boson hadronic decay is different from pp collisions. (iii) A check of the first two consequences serves as a natural probe of the Higgs boson lifetime
We focus on decays of the Higgs boson to bottom quarks for which the associated production with a Z boson and its subsequent leptonic decay gives the strongest sensitivity

Summary

Introduction

Production and Hadronic Decays of Higgs Bosons in Heavy-Ion Collisions Berger,1,* Jun Gao,2,† Adil Jueid,2,‡ and Hao Zhang3,4,§ We examine Higgs boson production and decay in heavy-ion collisions at the LHC and future colliders.

Results

Conclusion