Hadronic Decays of a Higgs-mixed Scalar

TL;DR

This paper investigates hadronic decays of a light scalar coupled to the Higgs, emphasizing nonperturbative QCD effects, quantifying uncertainties, and providing a public code for decay width calculations.

Contribution

It reexamines hadronic decay form factors of a Higgs-mixed scalar, quantifies uncertainties, and offers a public tool for decay width computations.

Findings

Quantified uncertainties in hadronic decay form factors.

Compared results with previous studies for the Higgs-mixed scalar.

Provided a public code for decay width calculations.

Abstract

One of the portals to new physics is a light scalar coupled to the Standard Model (SM) Higgs. In this paper we focus on hadronic decays of such a scalar in the regime where QCD dynamics is nonperturbative, resulting, e.g., in decays to pairs of pions or kaons, while also allowing for scalar couplings to the SM fermions to deviate from the Higgs-mixed light scalar limit. Representations of the corresponding form factors can be obtained using dispersive techniques, however, several sources of uncertainty affect the final results. We reexamine these decays, paying special attention to the quantification of uncertainties. For the light Higgs-mixed scalar scenario, we compare our results with previous works. For a general set of couplings of the light scalar to Standard Model fields, we provide a public code, {\tt hipsofcobra}, to compute the decay widths.