Leptonic cascade decays of a heavy Higgs boson through vectorlike leptons at the LHC

Abstract

We demonstrate the potential of fully leptonic cascade decays of a heavy neutral Higgs boson through vectorlike leptons as a simultaneous probe for extended Higgs sectors and extra matter particles at the LHC. The processes we explore are unique in that their event topologies lead to di-boson-like leptonic final states with a lepton pair which does not reconstruct the mass of a gauge boson. By recasting existing $2\ell +E_T^{\mathrm{miss}}$ and $3/4\ell$ searches channels using run2 data from the LHC we obtain $\text{model independent}$ bounds on the masses of heavy scalars and vectorlike leptons and use these results to explore future prospects at the HL-LHC. Our results can be directly applied to any kind of new physics scenarios sharing the final states and the event topology. For concreteness, we apply our results to a benchmark scenario: a two Higgs doublet model type-II augmented with vectorlike leptons. Remarkably, even with current data the sensitivity of our analysis shows a reach for masses of a heavy neutral Higgs and vectorlike leptons up to 2 TeV and 1.5 TeV, respectively. Even for low $\tan \beta \gtrsim 1,$ the analysis retains sensitivity to heavy Higgs masses slightly above 1 TeV. The future sensitivities at the HL-LHC extend the reach for heavy Higgses and new leptons to 2.7 TeV and 2 TeV, respectively.

30 pages, 17 figures and 1 supplemental material

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• Leptonic cascade decays of a heavy Higgs boson through vectorlike leptons at the LHC
• The Two Scales of New Physics in Higgs Couplings
• Semi-visible dark photon in a model with vector-like leptons for the $(g-2{)}_{e,\mu }$ and $W$-boson mass anomalies
• $W$ boson mass shift, dark matter and $(g-2{)}_{\ell }$ in a scotogenic-Zee model