Interference effects in BSM processes with a generalised narrow-width approximation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a generalized narrow-width approximation (NWA) that accurately accounts for interference effects between nearly degenerate particles in BSM processes, significantly improving prediction accuracy over the standard NWA.

Contribution

A new generalized NWA formulation that consistently includes interference effects between nearly degenerate particles in complex processes, validated at tree and one-loop levels.

Findings

Interference effects can be very large, drastically changing predictions.

The generalized NWA yields UV- and IR-finite results close to full calculations.

Agreement better than 1% with full process results at tree and one-loop levels.

Abstract

A generalisation of the narrow-width approximation (NWA) is formulated which allows for a consistent treatment of interference effects between nearly mass-degenerate particles in the factorisation of a more complicated process into production and decay parts. It is demonstrated that interference effects of this kind arising in BSM models can be very large, leading to drastic modifications of predictions based on the standard NWA. The application of the generalised NWA is demonstrated both at tree level and at one-loop order for an example process where the neutral Higgs bosons $h$ and $H$ of the MSSM are produced in the decay of a heavy neutralino and subsequently decay into a fermion pair. The generalised NWA, based on on-shell matrix elements or their approximations leading to simple weight factors, is shown to produce UV- and IR-finite results which are numerically close to the result of the full process at tree level and at one-loop order, where an agreement of better than $1\%$ is found for the considered process. The most accurate prediction for this process based on the generalised NWA, taking into account also corrections that are formally of higher orders, is briefly discussed.