Production of light pseudoscalars in external electromagnetic fields by the Schwinger mechanism

We generalize the Schwinger mechanism and calculate the probability of the decay of intense electromagnetic fields to pseudoscalar particles. We also point out that our estimate for axion emission in a previous paper was incorrect.Comment: 25 pages including 9 figures. Version that matches published versio

Limits on anomalous couplings of the Higgs boson to electroweak gauge bosons from LEP and the LHC

In this paper we assume the Higgs is an elementary scalar, and study how new physics could affect its couplings to electroweak gauge bosons. Adding LHC data to LEP data provides new, more stringent limits, particularly when the Higgs to two photon decay signal strength is taken into account. We then study the effect of anomalous angular correlations in the decay to WW*. We obtain a new limit on the rare decay to photon-Z, and use it to constrain supersymmetry, to find that staus with large mixing would be most sensitive to this channel. We also use these limits to constrain radion exchange in warped extra dimensions, finding a limit on the radion mass and interaction scale of the order of TeV. Finally, we have extrapolated the current data to obtain prospects for the full 2012 data set