Fady Bishara (U. Cincinnati)

Photon polarization in higgs decays

We show that the photon polarizations in the higgs to gamma gamma decay can be used to extract information about the CP properties of the higgs interactions.

The higgs to photons coupling is one-loop suppressed in the Standard Model (SM) and is a good place to test for New Physics (NP) for two reasons: first, NP that modifies the couplings of the higgs to vector bosons will have a larger effect on the h gamma gamma than the h Z Z coupling which is tree-level in the SM. Second, in the differential decay rate, CP violating observables are linearly proportional to interference terms that vanish in the total rate.

In the higgs to gamma gamma process, both photons convert via a Bethe-Heitler process in 25% of the events. For vector bosons in general, the decay plane is itself correlated with the boson polarization.

We construct observables sensitive to the CP violating terms in the decay process and present differential distributions from simulated events.

Jan 29 at 4pm in Geo/Phys Room 407