Weekly seminars
Shedding light on the Higgs identity through subleading production channels
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Europe/Paris
Auditorium Vivargent (Annecy-le-Vieux)
Auditorium Vivargent
Annecy-le-Vieux
Description
In this talk I will discuss two Higgs production channels at the LHC, namely $th$ and $hh$, which even though subleading can give valuable information on the Higgs couplings and the electroweak symmetry breaking sector. In particular, $th$ associated production can resolve the ambiguity in the sign of the top Yukawa that is present in current data, thanks to a striking enhancement of the cross section for $y_{t}<0$. I will present a phenomenological analysis of the $th$ channel, concentrating on the decay of the Higgs into $b\bar{b}$, and show that valuable information could be obtained already at 8 TeV. The second part of the talk will be focused on the $gg\to hh$ process, the dominant mechanism for double Higgs production at the LHC. This process is sensitive to the non-linear Higgs coupling $t\bar{t}hh$, which vanishes in the Standard Model, but is present if the Higgs is a composite state and can lead in certain cases to a large enhancement of the cross section. Furthermore, contrarily to the dominant single production process $gg\to h$, double Higgs production in gluon fusion is sensitive to the presence of light fermionic resonances (which are expected in a natural theory of strong EWSB) and could thus give indirect information on these states. The talk is mainly based on 1211.3736 and 1206.7120.