Confronting the fourth generation two Higgs doublet model with the phenomenology of heavy Higgs bosons

TL;DR

This paper investigates the viability of a modified fourth-generation two Higgs doublet model with wrong-sign Yukawa couplings, analyzing constraints from theory and experiments, and finds it is excluded by current LHC data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to salvage the fourth-generation model using wrong-sign Yukawa couplings in the Type-II 2HDM and analyzes its constraints and viability.

Findings

Perturbative unitarity bounds heavy Higgs masses below ~920 GeV.

Large Yukawa couplings enhance gluon fusion production of heavy Higgs bosons.

Current LHC data exclude the model at leading order.

Abstract

A sequential fourth generation is known to be excluded because the non-decoupling contribution to $\kappa_g$, the Higgs coupling modifier with a gluon pair, is unacceptably large. Recently a new way to save the model was suggested in the Type-II two Higgs doublet model: if the Yukawa couplings of down-type fermions have wrong-sign, the contributions from $t'$ and $b'$ to $\kappa_g$ are cancelled. We study the theoretical and experimental constraints on this model, focusing on the heavy Higgs bosons. Two constraining features are pointed out. First the exact wrong-sign limit does not allow the alignment, which makes the perturbative unitarity for the scalar-scalar scattering put the upper bounds on the heavy Higgs boson masses like $M_H, M_A \lesssim 920$ GeV and $M_{H^\pm} \lesssim 620$ GeV. Secondly, the Yukawa couplings of the fourth generation fermions to the heavy Higgs bosons are generically large as being proportional to the heavy fermion mass and, for the down-type fermions, to $\tan\beta$ as well. The gluon fusion productions of $H$ and $A$ through the fourth generation quark loops become significant. We found that the current LHC data on $pp \to Z Z$ for $H$ along with the theoretical and indirect constraints exclude the model at leading order.