Usefulness of effective field theory for boosted Higgs production

TL;DR

This paper explores the use of effective field theory to analyze boosted Higgs production at the LHC, assessing its potential to reveal high-scale new physics effects through high transverse momentum distributions.

Contribution

It demonstrates how EFT can be applied to boosted Higgs production to probe high-scale physics and evaluates the significance of dimension-7 operators in realistic models.

Findings

Dimension-7 effects are negligible at high p_T in realistic models.

EFT validity region is examined and clarified.

Heavy scalars and fermions influence Higgs-gluon couplings at TeV scales.

Abstract

The Higgs + jet channel at the LHC is sensitive to the effects of new physics both in the total rate and in the transverse momentum distribution at high p_T. We examine the production process using an effective field theory (EFT) language and discuss the possibility of determining the nature of the underlying high scale physics from boosted Higgs production. The effects of heavy color triplet scalars and top partner fermions with TeV scale masses are considered as examples and Higgs-gluon couplings of dimension-5 and dimension-7 are included in the EFT. As a by-product of our study, we examine the region of validity of the EFT. Dimension-7 contributions in realistic new physics models give effects in the high p_T tail of the Higgs signal which are so tiny that they are likely to be unobservable.