Explaining the CMS Higgs flavor violating decay excess

Abstract

Direct searches for lepton flavor violating Higgs boson decays in the $\tau \mu$ channel have been recently reported by the CMS collaboration. The results display a slight excess of signal events with a significance of 2.5$\sigma$, which translates into a branching ratio of about $1$%. By interpreting these findings as a hint for beyond the standard model physics, we show that the Type-III 2HDM is capable of reproducing such signal while at the same time satisfying vacuum stability, perturbativity, electroweak precision data, measured Higgs standard decay modes and low-energy lepton flavor violating constraints. We have found that the allowed signal strength ranges for the $b\bar{b}$, $W{W}^{\ast }$ and $Z{Z}^{\ast }$ standard channels shrink as soon as BR$(h\to \tau \mu )\sim 1$% is enforced. Thus, we point out that if the excess persists, improved measurements of these channels may be used to test our Type-III 2HDM scenario.

8 pages, 2 figures; v2: references added

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• Addressing the LHC flavour anomalies with horizontal gauge symmetries
• Higgs $\to \mu \tau$ in Abelian and Non-Abelian Flavor Symmetry Models
• Higgs $\to$ $\mu \tau$ as an indication for $S_4$ flavor symmetry
• Lepton flavor violation beyond the MSSM
• Explaining the LHC flavour anomalies
• Theory and phenomenology of lepton flavor violation