2HDM without FCNC: off the beaten tracks

We propose an alternative method of constructing two Higgs-doublet models free from scalar mediated FCNC couplings at the tree-level. In a toy scenario, we have presented semi realistic textures for the Yukawa matrices, which can reproduce the approximate flavor structure in the quark sector. Presence of flavor diagonal but nonuniversal Yukawa couplings emerges as a distinguishing feature of such models.Comment: 8 pages, no figures, minor clarifications added, version accepted for publication in EPJ

Cornering variants of Georgi-Machacek model using Higgs precision data

We show that in the absence of trilinear terms in the scalar potential of Georgi-Machacek model, heavy charged scalars do not necessarily decouple from the $h \to \gamma \gamma$ decay amplitude. In such scenarios, measurement of the Higgs to diphoton signal strength can place stringent constraints in the parameter space. Using the projected precisions at the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) and the ILC, we find that the upper bound on the triplet vacuum expectation value can be as low as 10 GeV. We also found that when combined with the theoretical constraints from perturbative unitarity and stability, such variants may be ruled out altogether.Comment: 9 pages, 4 captioned figures. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Nondecoupling of charged scalars in Higgs decay to two photons and symmetries of the scalar potential

A large class of two- and three-Higgs-doublet models with discrete symmetries has been employed in the literature to address various aspects of flavor physics. We analyse how the precision measurement of the Higgs to diphoton signal strength would severely constrain these scenarios due to the nondecoupling behavior of the charged scalars, to the extent that the number of additional scalar doublets can be constrained no matter how heavy the nonstandard scalars are. We demonstrate that if the scalar potential is endowed with appropriate global continuous symmetries together with soft breaking parameters, decoupling can be achieved thanks to the unitarity constraints on the mass-square differences of the heavy scalars.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, several clarifying remarks and references added, to appear in Phys Rev

Analysis of an extended scalar sector with S3S_3 symmetry

We investigate the scalar potential of a general $S_3$-symmetric three-Higgs-doublet model. The outcome of our analysis does not depend on the fermionic sector of the model. We identify a decoupling limit for the scalar spectrum of this scenario. In view of the recent LHC Higgs data, we show our numerical results only in the decoupling limit. Unitarity and stability of the scalar potential demand that many new scalars must be lurking below 1 TeV. We provide numerical predictions for $h\to \gamma \gamma$ and $h\to Z \gamma$ signal strengths which can be used to falsify the theory.Comment: One Eq. added, minor changes in figures and subsequent texts, version accepted in Phys. Rev. D, appendix included in the arXiv versio