Searching exotic Higgs bosons at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper investigates the potential to discover neutral exotic Higgs bosons with unconventional couplings at the 14 TeV LHC, focusing on their unique properties that evade standard constraints and proposing methods to identify them.

Contribution

It provides a model-independent analysis of exotic Higgs states with unusual couplings, exploring their discovery prospects and proposing specific kinematic variables to enhance detection.

Findings

Exotic Higgs states can be light due to their unconventional couplings.

Certain kinematic variables can suppress backgrounds, aiding discovery.

Analysis covers 13, 13.6, and 14 TeV LHC runs.

Abstract

We analyse in a model independent way the possibilities of digging out neutral exotic Higgs states, should they exist endowed with unconventional couplings with ordinary matter and gauge fields, at the 14 TeV run of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), adding some comparative studies for 13.6 and 13 TeV runs. Flavor models, based on some discrete symmetry groups, with extended scalar sectors are known to yield exotic spin-0 states, both CP-even and CP-odd, with purely flavor off-diagonal Yukawa couplings. The gauge interaction of one such CP-even state is also unusual that, unlike the Standard Model Higgs boson, it does not couple to gauge boson pairs. Such unconventional properties immune these exotic states from receiving traditional collider and electroweak constraints, and hence those states could be light. Without committing to any specific model, exploiting their peculiar Yukawa and gauge properties, we explore the discovery potential of those exotic Higgs states through some interesting topologies by figuring out some specific kinematic variables that suppress the backgrounds.