Probing the Electroweak Phase Transition at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper investigates how modifications to the Higgs potential, especially through higher-dimensional operators, relate to the nature of the electroweak phase transition and how these effects can be probed via double Higgs production at the LHC.

Contribution

It connects effective field theory operators with the electroweak phase transition and proposes strategies to measure deviations in the triple Higgs coupling at the LHC.

Findings

Large positive deviations of the triple Higgs coupling are linked to a strong first order phase transition.

Higher order operators can induce sizable negative deviations in the triple Higgs coupling.

Selective invariant mass cuts enhance the sensitivity to deviations in the triple Higgs coupling.

Abstract

We study the correlation between the value of the triple Higgs coupling and the nature of the electroweak phase transition. We use an effective potential approach, including higher order, non-renormalizable terms coming from integrating out new physics. We show that if only the dimension six operators are considered, large positive deviations of the triple Higgs coupling from its Standard Model (SM) value are predicted in the regions of parameter space consistent with a strong first order electroweak phase transition (SFOEPT). We also show that at higher orders sizable and negative deviations of the triple Higgs coupling may be obtained, and the sign of the corrections tends to be correlated with the order of the phase transition. We also consider a singlet extension of the SM, which allows us to establish the connection with the effective field theory (EFT) approach and analyze the limits of its validity. Furthermore, we study how to probe the triple Higgs coupling from the double Higgs production at the LHC. We show that selective cuts in the invariant mass of the two Higgs bosons should be used, to maximize the sensitivity for values of the triple Higgs coupling significantly different from the Standard Model one.