Speaker
Joachim Kopp
(Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics)
Description
As experimental evidence for a Higgs boson with a mass around 125 GeV is mounting, the question whether its couplings are Standard Model-like is becoming more and more important. Deviations from the Standard Model predictions could for example point to the existence of secondary mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking such as additional Higgs doublets, or to other types of new physics not too far above the electroweak scale. The flavor structure of such scenarios can be non-trivial, leading to the interesting observation that decays of the 125 GeV Higgs boson can be flavor-violating. In this paper, we derive constraints on flavor-violating Higgs decays into both leptons and quarks using data on rare decays, electric and magnetic dipole moment searches, and meson oscillations. We find that in some flavor-violating Higgs decay channels, for instance H -> \tau\mu, there is significant room for discoveries at the LHC, and we outline possible search strategies. We conclude that flavor violating Higgs decay may present an opportunity for discovery of new physics and in some cases may be easier to access experimentally than flavor conserving deviations from the Standard Model Higgs framework.
Primary author
Joachim Kopp
(Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics)
Co-authors
Jure Zupan
(University of Cincinnati)
Roni Harnik
(Fermilab)
