Invisible Decays in Higgs Pair Production
Résumé
Observation of Higgs pair production is an important long term objective of
the LHC physics program as it will shed light on the scalar potential of the
Higgs field and the nature of electroweak symmetry breaking. While numerous
studies have examined the impact of new physics on di-Higgs production, little
attention has been given to the well-motivated possibility of exotic Higgs
decays in this channel. Here we investigate the consequences of exotic
invisible Higgs decays in di-Higgs production. We outline a search sensitive to
such invisible decays in the $b\bar b+{\not \!\! E}_T$ channel. We demonstrate
that probing invisible branching ratios of order 10$\%$ during the LHC's
high-luminosity run will be challenging, but in resonance enhanced di-Higgs
production, this final state can become crucial to establish the existence of
physics beyond the Standard Model at collider energies. We also briefly discuss
the outlook for other exotic Higgs decay modes and the potential to observe
such exotic decays in the di-Higgs channel.