Flavor Violating Higgs Couplings in Minimal Flavor Violation

TL;DR

This paper investigates Higgs-mediated flavor-changing neutral currents within the minimal flavor violation framework, using current experimental data to constrain possible new physics effects and exploring future detection prospects.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive analysis of Higgs FCNC couplings under the MFV hypothesis, incorporating recent LHC and low-energy experimental constraints.

Findings

Severe constraints on Higgs FCNC couplings from LHC and B physics data.

Predicted branching ratios for LFV Higgs decays within allowed ranges.

Future experiments could further probe Higgs FCNC interactions.

Abstract

Motivated by the rencent LHC data on the lepton-flavor violating (LFV) decays $h\to \ell_1 \ell_2$ and $B_{s,d}\to \ell_1 \ell_2$, we study the Higgs-mediated flavor-changing neutral current (FCNC) interactions in the effective field theory (EFT) approach without and with the minimal flavor violation (MFV) hypothesis, and concentrate on the later. After considering the $B$ and $K$ physics data, the various LFV processes, and the LHC Higgs data, severe constraints on the Higgs FCNC couplings are derived, which are dominated by the LHC Higgs data, the $B_s - \bar B_s$ mixing, and the $\mu \to e \gamma$ decay. In the general case and the MFV framework, allowed ranges of various observables are obtained, such as $\mathcal B (B_s\to \ell_1 \ell_2)$, $\mathcal B (h\to \ell_1 \ell_2)$, $\mathcal B (h\to q_1 q_2)$, and the branching ratio of $\mu \to e$ conversion in Al. Future prospects of searching for the Higgs FCNC interactions at the low-energy experiments and the LHC are discussed.