Testing anomalous gauge couplings of the Higgs boson via weak-boson scatterings at the CERN LHC

Abstract

We propose a sensitive way to test the anomalous HVV couplings ${(V=W}^{\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}},{Z}^{0})$ of the Higgs boson $(H),$ which can arise from either the dimension-3 effective operator in a nonlinearly realized Higgs sector or the dimension-6 effective operators in a linearly realized Higgs sector, via studying the VV scattering processes at the CERN LHC. The gold-plated pure leptonic decay modes of the final state weak bosons in the processes $p\stackrel{\ensuremath{\rightarrow}}{p}\mathrm{VVjj}$ are studied. For comparison, we also analyze the constraints from the precision electroweak data, the expected precision of the measurements of the Higgs boson production rate, decay width and branching ratios at the Fermilab Tevatron run-2 and the CERN LHC, and the requirement of unitarity of the S matrix. We show that, with an integrated luminosity of $300{\mathrm{fb}}^{\ensuremath{-}1}$ and sufficient kinematical cuts for suppressing the backgrounds, studying the process $p\stackrel{\ensuremath{\rightarrow}}{p}{W}^{+}{W}^{+}j\stackrel{\ensuremath{\rightarrow}}{j}{l}^{+}\ensuremath{\nu}{l}^{+}\ensuremath{\nu}\mathrm{jj}$ can probe the anomalous HWW couplings at a few tens of percent level for the nonlinearly realized Higgs sector, and at the level of $0.01\char21{}0.08{\mathrm{TeV}}^{\ensuremath{-}1}$ for the linearly realized effective Lagrangian.