Diphoton and Z photon Decays of Higgs Boson in Gauge-Higgs Unification: A Snowmass white paper

TL;DR

This white paper explores how gauge-Higgs unification models in 5D spacetime can explain the enhanced Higgs diphoton decay signal observed at the LHC, predicting specific effects on Higgs decay modes and their correlations.

Contribution

It demonstrates that a simple gauge-Higgs unification model with color-singlet bulk fermions can account for the observed Higgs diphoton excess and predicts the absence of KK-mode contributions to the H-Z-gamma coupling at 1-loop.

Findings

The model explains the enhanced diphoton decay signal.

KK modes do not contribute to H-Z-gamma coupling at 1-loop.

Correlation between diphoton and Z photon decay modes can distinguish beyond Standard Model scenarios.

Abstract

In the context of gauge-Higgs unification scenario in a 5-dimensional flat spacetime, we investigate Higgs boson production via gluon fusion and its diphoton and Z gamma decay modes at the LHC. We show that the signal strength of the Higgs diphoton decay mode observed at ATLAS (and CMS), which is considerably larger than the Standard Model expectation, can be explained by a simple gauge-Higgs unification model with color-singlet bulk fermions to which a half-periodic boundary condition is assigned. The bulk fermions with mass at the TeV scale also play a crucial role in reproducing the observed Higgs boson mass of around 125 GeV. One naturally expects that the KK modes also contribute to the effective H-Z-gamma coupling. However, we show a very specific and general prediction of the gauge-Higgs unification scenario that KK-mode contributions to the H-Z-gamma coupling do not exist at the 1-loop level. If the excess of the Higgs to diphoton decay mode persists, its correlation with the Higgs to Z photon decay mode can be a clue to distinguish scenarios beyond the SM, providing a significant improvement of the sensitivity for the Higgs boson signals in the future.