Search for rare decays and lepton-flavor-violating decays of the Higgs boson at the ATLAS experiment

TL;DR

This paper reports on searches for rare and lepton-flavor-violating Higgs boson decays using ATLAS data, aiming to explore potential signs of physics beyond the Standard Model and study Higgs properties.

Contribution

It presents the latest experimental results from ATLAS on rare Higgs decay channels and lepton-flavor-violating decays at 13 TeV, expanding the search for new physics.

Findings

No significant excess observed in targeted decay channels

Constraints set on branching ratios of rare and lepton-flavor-violating decays

Results improve limits on beyond Standard Model physics scenarios

Abstract

The Standard Model predicts several rare Higgs boson decay channels, among which are the decays to a Z boson and a photon, to a low-mass lepton pair and a photon, and to a meson and a photon. The observation of some of these decays could open the possibility of studying the CP and coupling properties of the Higgs boson in a complementary way to other analyses. In addition, lepton-flavor-violating decays of the observed Higgs boson are searched for, where an observation would be a clear sign of physics effects beyond the Standard Model. These proceedings present selected recent results for such decays based on proton-proton collision data at 13 TeV collected by the ATLAS experiment in Run 2 of the LHC.