Dark Coloured Scalars Impact on Single and Di-Higgs Production at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper investigates how dark-colored scalar particles influence single and double Higgs production at the LHC, highlighting their potential to reveal dark sector effects through loop contributions to Standard Model processes.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the impact of multiple coloured scalars on Higgs production, extending previous studies to arbitrary numbers of scalars and focusing on their loop effects.

Findings

Coloured scalars can significantly alter Higgs production rates.

The effects depend on the number of scalars and their properties.

Complementarity between single and double Higgs channels is emphasized.

Abstract

The search for Dark Matter (DM) at colliders is primarily pursued via the detection of missing energy in particular final states. These searches are based on the production and decay processes where final states include DM particles and at least one Standard Model (SM) particle. DM will then reveal itself as missing energy. An alternative form to get a hint of a dark sector is via loop contribution to SM processes. In this case, it is not even relevant if the new particles have their origin in the dark sector of the model. In this work we discuss the impact of an arbitrary number of coloured scalars in single Higgs and double Higgs production at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and we show their complementarity. We determine the range of variation of the corrections relative to the SM for an arbitrary number of coloured scalars $n$, and discuss in more detail the cases $n=1$ and $n=2$.