Jets and Photons Spectroscopy of Higgs-ALP Interactions

Abstract

Axion-like particles (ALPs) and Higgs bosons can interact in scalar sectors beyond the Standard Model, leading the Higgs boson to decay into pairs of gluons and photons through the ALP interaction and giving rise to resonances in the decay products of the process $h\to aa\to gg+\gamma \gamma$, resembling a spectral lines analysis. We explore this signature to constrain an ALP effective field theory formulation and show that the forthcoming runs of the LHC will be capable to probe the ALP-Higgs interaction in the ALP mass range from 0.5 to 60 GeV using an automatized search strategy that adapts to different ALP masses in inclusive jets plus photons final states. Such interaction can also be tested in mass regions where the two and four-photon search channels are currently ineffective.

14 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (9)

• The automated computation of tree-level and next-to-leading order differential cross sections, and their matching to parton shower simulations
• Simplified Dark Matter Models for the Galactic Center Gamma-Ray Excess
• Measurements of the Higgs boson width and anomalous HVV couplings from on-shell and off-shell production in the four-lepton final state
• Anomalous solutions to the strong CP problem
• New Probes for Axion-like Particles at Hadron Colliders
• Search for a light pseudoscalar Higgs boson in the boosted $\mu \mu \tau \tau$ final state in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}=$ 13 TeV
• Collider constraints on axion-like particles
• Dissecting Multi-Photon Resonances at the Large Hadron Collider
• Data Augmentation at the LHC through Analysis-specific Fast Simulation with Deep Learning