Searching for exotic production of Higgs boson + $X$ to map out new physics

We propose leveraging our proficiency for detecting Higgs resonances by using the Higgs as a tagging object for new heavy physics. In particular, we argue that searches for exotic Higgs production from decays of color-singlet fields with electroweak charges could beat current searches at the Large Hadron Collider which look for their decays to vectors. As an example, we study the production and decay of vectorlike leptons which admit Yukawa couplings with Standard Model leptons. We find that bounds from run 2 searches are consistent with anywhere from hundreds to many thousands of Higgses having been produced in their decays over the same period, depending on the representation. Dedicated searches for these signatures may thus be able to significantly improve our reach at the electroweak energy frontier.

Figure 1

Branching ratios of the $SU(2)$ singlet $E$ as a function of the mass parameter $M_E^{\prime }$.

Figure 2

Production cross section of $E\overline{E}$ at the 14 TeV LHC.

Figure 3

Branching ratios of the charged component of the $SU(2)$ doublet ${\mathrm{\Delta }}_1$ as a function of the mass parameter $M_{{\mathrm{\Delta }}_1}^{\prime }$.

Figure 4

Production cross section of the components of ${\mathrm{\Delta }}_1{\overline{\mathrm{\Delta }}}_1$ at the 14 TeV LHC.

Figure 5

Branching ratios of the charged component of the $SU(2)$ triplet $\mathrm{\Sigma }$ as a function of the mass parameter $M_{\mathrm{\Sigma }}^{\prime }$.

Figure 6

Production cross section of the components of $\mathrm{\Sigma }\overline{\mathrm{\Sigma }}$ at the 14 TeV LHC.

Figure 7

Number of anomalous Higgs events from production of the $SU(2)$ singlet at run 2 of the LHC. The red line denotes the lower mass bound placed by our reinterpretation of the CMS multilepton search.

Figure 8

The same as Fig. 7 for the doublet.

Figure 9

The same as Fig. 7 for the triplet.

Figure 10

Bounds on the singlet parameter space from the SMEFT analysis [52] (blue) and the CMS multilepton search [73] (orange). The dashed lines show the masses at which the labeled number of anomalous Higgs events would have been produced in run 2.

Figure 11

The same as Fig. 10 for the doublet.

Figure 12

The same as Fig. 10 for the triplet.

Figure 13

The electron identification efficiency we use for the delphes card.

Figure 14

The muon identification efficiency we use for the delphes card.

Figure 15

Comparison of the 3L below-Z signal region between the simulation performed in the CMS analysis [73] for the $M_{\mathrm{\Sigma }}=700\mathrm{GeV}$ point and our simulation of the same model implemented in our analysis pipeline. The black intervals denote our $1\sigma$ statistical uncertainty bands.

Figure 16

The same as Fig. 15 for the 3L on-Z signal region.

Figure 17

The same as Fig. 15 for the 3L above-Z signal region.

Figure 18

The same as Fig. 15 for the 3L OSSF0 signal region.

Figure 19

The same as Fig. 15 for the 4L OSSF0 signal region.

Figure 20

The same as Fig. 15 for the 4L OSSF1 signal region.

Figure 21

The same as Fig. 15 for the 4L OSSF2 signal region.