Higgs Signatures in Inverse Seesaw Model at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper explores unique Higgs signatures in the inverse seesaw model at the LHC, focusing on lepton flavor violation and soft lepton detection prospects at 8 and 14 TeV energies.

Contribution

It introduces the potential for non-standard Higgs signatures, including lepton flavor violation, arising from the inverse seesaw mechanism with B-L symmetry breaking.

Findings

Lepton flavor violating di-lepton signatures can be observed with 10-20/fb at 8 TeV.

Soft leptons from right-handed neutrino decays may evade current trigger cuts.

Higher energy (14 TeV) enhances the detection prospects and parameter space coverage.

Abstract

In the inverse seesaw mechanism where the spontaneously broken B-L symmetry induces tiny B-L violating Majorana masses for right-handed neutrinos, non-standard Higgs signatures can arise due to a possible Higgs doublet and singlet mixing and/or Higgs boson decays to a left- and right-handed neutrino. This leads to a remarkable feature of hadronically quiet di-lepton final states which can exhibit, in particular, lepton flavour violating signatures coming from flavour-dependent neutrino Yukawa couplings. In this process, one lepton coming from the right-handed decay could be soft enough can be missed by the trigger level cuts of CMS and ATLAS for the di-lepton plus missing energy signature. The prospects of such a signature are investigated for 8 TeV and 14 TeV center of mass energy of the LHC, taking the maximum value of the allowed neutrino Yukawa coupling and the right-handed neutrino mass of 100 GeV. A PYTHIA level simulation shows that the integrated luminosity of 10--20/fb and 1.6/fb for 8 TeV is required to observe the inclusive leptonic and lepton flavour violating signatures, respectively. For 14 TeV, the reach is more and a larger parameter space of the inverse seesaw model can be probed.