Probing Spontaneous CP-Violation through Precision Higgs Observables

TL;DR

This paper explores how spontaneous CP-violation in a two Higgs doublet model causes measurable deviations in Higgs observables, with implications for Higgs sector structure and flavor-violating decays.

Contribution

It demonstrates the non-decoupling effects of spontaneous CP-violation on Higgs observables and establishes correlations between deviations in Higgs couplings and decay rates.

Findings

Deviations in ${ m B}_{h o \gamma\gamma}$ exceed 10%.

Deviations in ${ m B}_{h o Z\gamma}$ exceed 4%.

Correlated deviations in $hhh$ coupling and ${ m B}_{h o \gamma\gamma}$ are identified.

Abstract

We investigate the implications of spontaneous CP-violation in the general two Higgs doublet model, which leads to a non-decoupling structure of the Higgs sector. All the masses of the Higgs bosons are purely determined by the vacuum expectation value of the Higgs fields, and are thus constrained to be smaller than ${\cal O}(500)$ GeV by the perturbative unitarity bound. Such a non-decoupling nature predicts sizable deviations from the standard model expectations in the observables of the discovered Higgs boson ($h$). We find that the magnitude of deviations in ${\cal B}_{h \to \gamma\gamma}$ (${\cal B}_{h \to Z\gamma}$) are larger than $\sim 10\%~(4\%)$ in the Higgs alignment limit. Moreover, we show that a robust correlation emerges between the deviations in the one-loop corrected $hhh$ coupling and ${\cal B}_{h \to \gamma\gamma}$ to be, e.g., 200\%~(50\%) and $-10.3\%$ ($-10.8\%$), respectively, under the constraints from theoretical bounds and current experimental data. Using a few benchmark points, we highlight that flavor-violating decays of the additional Higgs bosons can be sizable due to the constrained structure of the Yukawa interactions.