On the production of a composite Higgs boson

TL;DR

This paper develops a method to calculate the production rate of a composite Higgs boson via gluon fusion, accounting for its pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone nature and effects often neglected, revealing its dependence on the decay constant and impact of electroweak constraints.

Contribution

It introduces a new prescription for computing the gluon fusion rate of a composite Higgs, considering effects of its composite structure and applying it to various models.

Findings

Rate depends only on decay constant 'f', not on new particle masses.

Electroweak constraints reduce the production rate by 10-30% or more.

The method accounts for previously neglected effects due to compositeness.

Abstract

We present a prescription for computing the gluon fusion production rate of a composite Higgs boson, which arises as a pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson, using effective lagrangians. The calculation incorporates three different effects due to the composite nature of the Higgs, some of which were neglected previously. We apply the prescription to models with and without the collective breaking mechanism. In sharp contrast with the case of a fundamental Higgs scalar, the rate only depends on the decay constant "f" and is not sensitive to masses of new particles. After including electroweak constraints, there is a substantial reduction in the rate, in the range of 10 -- 30 % or greater.