Probing anomalous heavy neutral Higgs bosons at the LHC II: LHC signatures

TL;DR

This paper investigates the potential LHC signatures of a non-standard heavy neutral Higgs boson through model-independent analysis, focusing on WW scattering and VH production, and proposes methods to measure anomalous couplings.

Contribution

It provides a detailed, hadron-level analysis of LHC signatures for heavy Higgs bosons with anomalous couplings, including background suppression and observable proposals.

Findings

VH associated production shows a clear mass peak for Higgs detection.

Certain kinematic cuts effectively suppress backgrounds.

Proposed observables can measure anomalous couplings f_W and f_WW.

Abstract

In this manuscript, we study the LHC signatures of a non-standard heavy neutral Higgs boson H at the 14 TeV LHC model-independently by taking the anomalous HVV coupling constants in the possible range obtained in our previous paper, Ref.[1]. We suggest WW scattering and VH associated production as two sensitive processes for detecting H, and the latter is more sensitive than the former. The study is at the hadron level with signals and backgrounds carefully calculated. Certain kinematic cuts are proposed to suppress the backgrounds effectively. We take several values of the heavy Higgs masses in the few hundred GeV range as examples. We show that, in VH associated production, the invariant mass distribution M(J_1,J_2) of the final state jets can show a clear peak at M(J_1,J_2)=M_H with reasonable integrated luminosity. Finally, we propose several detectable observables from which the values of the anomalous coupling constants f_W and f_WW can be measured experimentally.