Exclusive Radiative Higgs Decays as Probes of Light-Quark Yukawa Couplings

TL;DR

This paper analyzes rare Higgs decays into a vector meson and a photon to explore light-quark Yukawa couplings, employing next-to-leading order QCD calculations and proposing strategies to reduce theoretical uncertainties for future collider experiments.

Contribution

It provides a model-independent analysis of h->Vγ decays, including NLO QCD effects and a method to minimize uncertainties, enabling probing of light-quark Yukawa couplings at high-luminosity colliders.

Findings

Decay rates are sensitive to light-quark Yukawa couplings.

Ratios of branching fractions can probe b-quark Yukawa modifications.

Strategies to reduce theoretical uncertainties enhance measurement precision.

Abstract

We present a detailed analysis of the rare exclusive Higgs-boson decays into a single vector meson and a photon and investigate the possibility of using these processes to probe the light-quark Yukawa couplings. We work with an effective Lagrangian with modified Higgs couplings to account for possible new-physics effects in a model-independent way. The h->V\gamma{} decay rate is governed by the destructive interference of two amplitudes, one of which involves the Higgs coupling to the quark anti-quark pair inside the vector meson. We derive this amplitude at next-to-leading order in \alpha_s using QCD factorization, including the resummation of large logarithmic corrections and accounting for the effects of flavor mixing. The high factorization scale \mu~m_h ensures that our results are rather insensitive to the hadronic parameters characterizing the light-cone distribution amplitude of the vector meson. The second amplitude arises from the loop-induced effective h\gamma\gamma* and h\gamma Z* couplings, where the off-shell gauge boson converts into the vector meson. We devise a strategy to eliminate theoretical uncertainties related to this amplitude to almost arbitrary precision. This opens up the possibility to probe for O(1) modifications of the c- and b-quark Yukawa couplings and O(30) modifications of the s-quark Yukawa coupling in the high-luminosity LHC run. In particular, we show that measurements of the ratios Br(h->\Upsilon(nS)\gamma)/Br(h->\gamma\gamma) and Br(h->bb)/Br(h->\gamma\gamma) can provide complementary information on the real and imaginary parts of the b-quark Yukawa coupling. More accurate measurements would be possible at a future 100 TeV proton-proton collider.