As I’ve emphasized elsewhere, it is certainly possible that the newly-discovered Standard-Model-like Higgs particle has unexpected decays, involving as-yet unknown particles.
Below are links to the pages describing various classes of non-Standard-Model Higgs decays that were studied in our recent paper (which I briefly described in December):
Exotic Decays of the 125 GeV Higgs Boson
David Curtin, Rouven Essig, Stefania Gori, Prerit Jaiswal, Andrey Katz, Tao Liu, Zhen Liu, David McKeen, Jessie Shelton, Matthew Strassler Ze’ev Surujon, Brock Tweedie, Yi-Ming Zhong
here’s a PDF version of the paper, 172 pages
See also our technical website, where much of the information is summarized for experts: http://exotichiggs.physics.sunysb.edu/
We studied decays of the Higgs involving up to four quarks, leptons, photons or gluons. [Here “quarks” means quarks or anti-quarks, etc.] These include
- Higgs decays to new spin-zero particles, and from there to four quarks, leptons, photons or gluons
- Higgs decays to new spin-one particles, and from there to four quarks or leptons
- Higgs decays involving new “invisible” (meta)stable particles
- Higgs decays to groups of highly collimated particles
These do not include
- Higgs decays to τμ, or other direct flavor violating decays;
- Higgs decays to more than four quarks, leptons, photons or gluons
- Higgs decays to complex clusters of particles;
- Higgs decays to new long-lived particles;
Nor have we studied decays of other as-yet undiscovered additional Higgs particles, if any.
