Measuring properties of a Heavy Higgs boson in the $H\to t\bar t \to bW^+\bar b W^-$ decay

TL;DR

This paper develops a method to analyze the angular distributions of decay products from a heavy Higgs boson decaying into top quarks, enabling the determination of its CP properties and couplings at the LHC.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive angular analysis framework using helicity amplitudes to fully determine the Higgs-top couplings from decay distributions.

Findings

Six angular observables identified.

Two observables accessible via one-dimensional distributions.

Couplings can be measured with 10-20% accuracy using 10,000 events.

Abstract

Suppose a heavy neutral Higgs or scalar boson $H$ is discovered at the LHC, it is important to investigate its couplings to the standard model particles as much as possible. Here in this work we attempt to probe the CP-even and CP-odd couplings of the heavy Higgs boson to a pair of top quarks, through the decay $H \to t\bar t \to b W^+ \bar b W^-$. We use the helicity-amplitude method to write down the most general form for the angular distributions of the final-state $b$ quarks and $W$ bosons. We figure out that there are 6 types of angular observables and, under CP$\widetilde{\rm T}$ conservation, one-dimensional angular distributions can only reveal two of them. Nevertheless, the $H$ couplings to the $t\bar t$ pair can be fully determined by exploiting the one-dimensional angular distributions. A Higgs-boson mass of 380 GeV not too far above the $t\bar t$ threshold is illustrated with full details. With a total of $10^4$ events of $H \to t\bar t \to bW^+ \bar b W^+$, one can determine the couplings up to 10-20 % uncertainties.