Roberto Contino

Strong Double Higgs Production at the LHC

The hierarchy problem and the electroweak data, together, provide a plausible motivation for considering a light Higgs emerging as a pseudo-Goldstone boson from a strongly-coupled sector. In that scenario, the rates for Higgs production and decay differ significantly from those in the Standard Model. However, one genuine strong coupling signature is the growth with energy of the scattering amplitudes among the Goldstone bosons, the longitudinally polarized vector bosons as well as the Higgs boson itself. The rate for double Higgs production in vector boson fusion is thus enhanced with respect to its negligible rate in the SM. We study that reaction in pp collisions, where the production of two Higgs bosons at high pT is associated with the emission of two forward jets. We concentrate on the decay mode hh → WW(*)WW(*) and study the semi-leptonic decay chains of the W’s with 2, 3 or 4 leptons in the final states. While the 3 lepton final states are the most relevant and can lead to a 3σ signal significance with 300 fb−1 collected at a 14TeV LHC, the two same-sign lepton final states provide complementary information. We also comment on the prospects for improving the detectability of double Higgs production at the foreseen LHC energy and luminosity upgrades.

Discovering the top partners at the LHC using same-sign dilepton final states

A natural, non-supersymmetric solution to the hierarchy problem generically requires fermionic partners of the top quark with masses not much heavier than 500GeV. We study the pair production and detection at the LHC of the top partners with electric charge Qe = 5/3 (T5/3) and Qe = −1/3 (B), that are predicted in models where the Higgs is a pseudo-Goldstone boson. The exotic T 5/3 fermion, in particular, is the distinct prediction of a LR custodial parity invariance of the electroweak symmetry breaking sector. Both kinds of new fermions decay to W t, leading to a tW final state. We focus on the golden channel with two same-sign leptons, and show that a discovery could come with less than 100pb −1 (less than 20fb −1 ) of integrated luminosity for masses M = 500GeV (M = 1TeV). In the case of the T5/3, we present a simple strategy for its reconstruction in the fully hadronic decay chain. Although no full mass reconstruction is possible for the B, we still find that the same-sign dilepton channel offers the best chances of discovery compared to other previous searches that used final states with one or two opposite-sign leptons, and hence suffered from the large tbackground.

Composite Higgs-mediated flavor-changing neutral current

We discuss how, in the presence of higher-dimensional operators, the Standard Model (SM) fermion masses can be misaligned in flavor space with the Yukawa couplings to the Higgs boson, even with only one Higgs doublet. Such misalignment results in flavor-violating couplings to the Higgs and hence flavor-changing neutral current (FCNC) processes from tree-level Higgs exchange. We perform a model-independent analysis of such an effect. Specializing to the framework of a composite Higgs with partially composite SM gauge and fermion fields, we show that the constraints on the compositeness scale implied by ǫK can be generically as strong as those from the exchange of heavy spin-1 resonances if the Higgs is light and strongly coupled to the new states. In the special and well motivated case of a composite pseudo-Goldstone Higgs, we find that the shift symmetry acting on the Higgs forces an alignment of the fermion mass terms with their Yukawa couplings at leading order in the fermions’ degree of compositeness, thus implying much milder bounds. As a consequence of the flavor-violating Higgs couplings, we estimate BR(t → ch) ∼ 10 and BR(h → tc) ∼ 5× 10 both for a pseudo-Goldstone (if tR is fully composite) and for a generic composite Higgs. By virtue of the AdS/CFT correspondence, our results directly apply to 5-dimensional RandallSundrum compactifications.

On the validity of the effective field theory approach to SM precision tests

A bstractWe discuss the conditions for an effective field theory (EFT) to give an adequate low-energy description of an underlying physics beyond the Standard Model (SM). Starting from the EFT where the SM is extended by dimension-6 operators, experimental data can be used without further assumptions to measure (or set limits on) the EFT parameters. The interpretation of these results requires instead a set of broad assumptions (e.g. power counting rules) on the UV dynamics. This allows one to establish, in a bottom-up approach, the validity range of the EFT description, and to assess the error associated with the truncation of the EFT series. We give a practical prescription on how experimental results could be reported, so that they admit a maximally broad range of theoretical interpretations. Namely, the experimental constraints on dimension-6 operators should be reported as functions of the kinematic variables that set the relevant energy scale of the studied process. This is especially important for hadron collider experiments where collisions probe a wide range of energy scales.

New Prospects for Higgs Compositeness in h -> Z gamma

We discuss novel effects in the phenomenology of a light Higgs boson within the context of composite models. We show that large modifications may arise in the decay of a composite Nambu-Goldstone boson Higgs to a photon and a Z boson, h -> Z gamma. These can be generated by the exchange of massive composite states of a strong sector that breaks a left-right symmetry, which we show to be the sole symmetry structure responsible for governing the size of these new effects in the absence of Goldstone-breaking interactions. In this paper we consider corrections to the decay h -> Z gamma obtained either by integrating out vectors at tree level, or by integrating out vector-like fermions at loop level. In each case, the pertinent operators that are generated are parametrically enhanced relative to other interactions that arise at loop level in the Standard Model such as h -> gg and h -> gamma gamma. Thus we emphasize that the effects of interest here provide a unique possibility to probe the dynamics underlying electroweak symmetry breaking, and do not depend on any contrivance stemming from carefully chosen spectra. The effects we discuss naturally lead to concerns of compatibility with precision electroweak measurements, and we show with relevant computations that these corrections can be kept well under control in our general parameter space.

eHDECAY: An implementation of the Higgs effective Lagrangian into HDECAY☆

We present eHDECAY, a modified version of the program HDECAY which includes the full list of leading bosonic operators of the Higgs effective Lagrangian with a linear or non-linear realization of the electroweak symmetry and implements two benchmark composite Higgs models

One-loop effects from spin-1 resonances in Composite Higgs models

A bstractWe compute the 1-loop correction to the electroweak observables from spin-1 resonances in SO(5)/SO(4) composite Higgs models. The strong dynamics is modeled with an effective description comprising the Nambu-Goldstone bosons and the lowest-lying spin-1 resonances. A classification is performed of the relevant operators including custodially-breaking effects from the gauging of hypercharge. The 1-loop contribution of the resonances is extracted in a diagrammatic approach by matching to the low-energy theory of Nambu-Goldstone bosons. We find that the correction is numerically important in a significant fraction of the parameter space and tends to weaken the bounds providing a negative shift to the S parameter.

Higgs pair production in vector-boson fusion at the LHC and beyond

The production of pairs of Higgs bosons at hadron colliders provides unique information on the Higgs sector and on the mechanism underlying electroweak symmetry breaking (EWSB). Most studies have concentrated on the gluon-fusion production mode which has the largest cross section. However, despite its small production rate, the vector-boson fusion channel can also be relevant since even small modifications of the Higgs couplings to vector bosons induce a striking increase of the cross section as a function of the invariant mass of the Higgs boson pair. In this work we exploit this unique signature to propose a strategy to extract the hhVV quartic coupling and provide model-independent constraints on theories where EWSB is driven by new strong interactions. We take advantage of the higher signal yield of the

Higgs and EW symmetry breaking studies

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