Abstract
Yukawa couplings of the first quark generation are notoriously difficult to constrain due to their small values within the Standard Model. Here we propose Higgs off-shell production, with the Higgs boson decaying to four leptons, as a probe of the up- and down-quark Yukawa couplings. Using kinematic discriminants similar to the ones employed in the Higgs width measurements we find that the down (up) Yukawa coupling can be constrained to a factor of 156 (260) times its Standard Model value at the high-luminosity LHC assuming only experimental systematic uncertainties. Off-shell Higgs production hence provides better sensitivity to the first-generation quark Yukawa couplings with respect to other probes such as Higgs+jet or Higgs pair production.
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Acknowledgments
We thank E. Salvioni and J. Campbell for useful discussions. We thank L. Alasfar for providing us the script for figure 10. R.G. and M.V. acknowledge support from a departmental research grant under the project “Machine Learning approach to Effective Field Theories in Higgs Physics”. The work of R.G. has been partially supported by the Italian Ministry of Research (MUR) under contract 2017FMJFMW (PRIN2017). The work of M.V. has been partially supported by the MUR under grant PRIN 20172LNEEZ. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Staff Exchange grant agreement No 101086085 — ASYMMETRY.
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Balzani, E., Gröber, R. & Vitti, M. Light-quark Yukawa couplings from off-shell Higgs production. J. High Energ. Phys. 2023, 27 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP10(2023)027
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP10(2023)027