Charming the Higgs
Abstract
We show that current Higgs data permit a significantly enhanced Higgs coupling to charm pairs, comparable to the Higgs to bottom pairs coupling in the Standard Model, without resorting to additional new physics sources in Higgs production. With a mild level of the latter current data even allow for the Higgs to charm pairs to be the dominant decay channel. An immediate consequence of such a large charm coupling is a significant reduction of the Higgs signal strengths into the known final states as in particular into bottom pairs. This might reduce the visible vector-boson associated Higgs production rate to a level that could compromise the prospects of ever observing it. We however demonstrate that a significant fraction of this reduced signal can be recovered by jet-flavor-tagging targeted towards charm-flavored jets. Finally we argue that an enhanced Higgs to charm pairs coupling can be obtained in various new physics scenarios in the presence of only a mild accidental cancellation between various contributions.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1310.7029,
title = {Charming the Higgs},
author = {Cédric Delaunay and Tobias Golling and Gilad Perez and Yotam Soreq},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1310.7029},
year = {2014}
}
Comments
8 pages, 3 figures