Highly Boosted Higgs Bosons and Unitarity in Vector-Boson Fusion at Future Hadron Colliders

TL;DR

This paper investigates how new interactions affecting Higgs pair production via vector-boson fusion can be observed at current and future colliders, focusing on boosted Higgs tagging and unitarity constraints to estimate discovery potential.

Contribution

It introduces a method to probe the operator $h^2 W_{ ext{mu nu}}^a W^{a, ext{mu nu}}$ in Higgs pair production at colliders, incorporating unitarity bounds for the first time.

Findings

Projected bounds on the operator coefficient at colliders.

Enhanced sensitivity with boosted Higgs tagging.

Estimation of discovery potential considering unitarity constraints.

Abstract

We study the observability of new interactions which modify Higgs-pair production via vector-boson fusion processes at the LHC and at future proton-proton colliders. In an effective-Lagrangian approach, we explore in particular the effect of the operator $h^2 W_{\mu\nu}^a W^{a,\mu\nu}$, which describes the interaction of the Higgs boson with transverse vector-boson polarization modes. By tagging highly boosted Higgs bosons in the final state, we determine projected bounds for the coefficient of this operator at the LHC and at a future 27 TeV or 100 TeV collider. Taking into account unitarity constraints, we estimate the new-physics discovery potential of Higgs pair production in this channel.