An Exclusive Window onto Higgs Yukawa Couplings

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to probe Higgs Yukawa couplings to light quarks through rare decay measurements involving vector mesons and gauge bosons, highlighting the potential of future colliders.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to measure both flavor-conserving and flavor-violating Higgs couplings via rare decay channels h->MV, with detailed branching ratio calculations.

Findings

Branching ratios calculated for Standard Model and extensions.

Experimental prospects discussed for high-luminosity colliders.

Unique access to light-quark Yukawa couplings at future colliders.

Abstract

We show that both flavor-conserving and flavor-violating Yukawa couplings of the Higgs boson to first- and second-generation quarks can be probed by measuring rare decays of the form h->MV, where M denotes a vector meson and V indicates either gamma, W or Z. We calculate the branching ratios for these processes in both the Standard Model and its possible extensions. We discuss the experimental prospects for their observation. The possibility of accessing these Higgs couplings appears to be unique to the high-luminosity LHC and future hadron colliders, providing further motivation for those machines.