Invisible Decays in Higgs Pair Production

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential to detect exotic invisible Higgs decays in di-Higgs production at the LHC, emphasizing the importance of this channel for discovering physics beyond the Standard Model.

Contribution

It introduces a search strategy for invisible Higgs decays in di-Higgs production and discusses its significance in high-luminosity and resonance-enhanced scenarios.

Findings

Probing 10% invisible branching ratios is challenging at high luminosity.

Resonance-enhanced di-Higgs production can improve detection prospects.

Invisible decays in di-Higgs channels are crucial for new physics discovery.

Abstract

Observation of Higgs pair production is an important long term objective of the LHC physics program as it will shed light on the scalar potential of the Higgs field and the nature of electroweak symmetry breaking. While numerous studies have examined the impact of new physics on di-Higgs production, little attention has been given to the well-motivated possibility of exotic Higgs decays in this channel. Here we investigate the consequences of exotic invisible Higgs decays in di-Higgs production. We outline a search sensitive to such invisible decays in the $b\bar b+{\not \!\! E}_T$ channel. We demonstrate that probing invisible branching ratios of order 10$\%$ during the LHC's high-luminosity run will be challenging, but in resonance enhanced di-Higgs production, this final state can become crucial to establish the existence of physics beyond the Standard Model at collider energies. We also briefly discuss the outlook for other exotic Higgs decay modes and the potential to observe such exotic decays in the di-Higgs channel.