Off-shell Higgs Couplings in $H^{\ast }\to ZZ\to \ell \ell \nu \nu$

Abstract

We explore the new physics reach for the off-shell Higgs boson measurement in the $pp\to H^{\ast }\to Z({\ell }^{+}{\ell }^{-})Z(\nu \bar{\nu })$ channel at the high-luminosity LHC. The new physics sensitivity is parametrized in terms of the Higgs boson width, effective field theory framework, and a non-local Higgs-top coupling form factor. Adopting Machine-learning techniques, we demonstrate that the combination of a large signal rate and a precise phenomenological probe for the process energy scale, due to the transverse $ZZ$ mass, leads to significant sensitivities beyond the existing results in the literature for the new physics scenarios considered.

8 pages, 9 figures, 1 table