Higgs pair production in vector-boson fusion at the LHC and beyond

The production of pairs of Higgs bosons at hadron colliders provides unique information on the Higgs sector and on the mechanism underlying electroweak symmetry breaking (EWSB). Most studies have concentrated on the gluon fusion production mode which has the largest cross section. However, despite its small production rate, the vector-boson fusion channel can also be relevant since even small modifications of the Higgs couplings to vector bosons induce a striking increase of the cross section as a function of the invariant mass of the Higgs boson pair. In this work, we exploit this unique signature to propose a strategy to extract the $hhVV$ quartic coupling and provide model-independent constraints on theories where EWSB is driven by new strong interactions. We take advantage of the higher signal yield of the $b\bar b b\bar b$ final state and make extensive use of jet substructure techniques to reconstruct signal events with a boosted topology, characteristic of large partonic energies, where each Higgs boson decays to a single collimated jet . Our results demonstrate that the $hhVV$ coupling can be measured with 45% (20%) precision at the LHC for $\mathcal{L}=$ 300 (3000) fb$^{-1}$, while a 1% precision can be achieved at a 100 TeV collider.Comment: Updated to match published version in EPJC and fixed typo in Tab. 10 (column labels a & b were swapped

From quarks to nucleons in dark matter direct detection

We provide expressions for the nonperturbative matching of the effective field theory describing dark matter interactions with quarks and gluons to the effective theory of nonrelativistic dark matter interacting with nonrelativistic nucleons. We give the leading and subleading order expressions in chiral counting. In general, a single partonic operator already matches onto several nonrelativistic operators at leading order in chiral counting. Thus, keeping only one operator at the time in the nonrelativistic effective theory does not properly describe the scattering in direct detection. Moreover, the matching of the axial--axial partonic level operator, as well as the matching of the operators coupling DM to the QCD anomaly term, naively include momentum suppressed terms. However, these are still of leading chiral order due to pion poles and can be numerically important. We illustrate the impact of these effects with several examples.Comment: 47 pages, 8 figures. Improved discussion, corrected typographical errors, updated reference

Complementary constraints on ZbbˉZb\bar{b} couplings at the LHC

We propose a new strategy to probe the $Z$ boson couplings to bottom and charm quarks at the LHC. In this work we mainly focus on the case of bottom quarks. Here, the $Z$ boson is produced in association with two $b$-jets and decays to electrons or muons. In this final state, tagging the charge of the $b$-jets allows us to measure the charge asymmetry and thus to directly probe the $Zb\bar{b}$ couplings. The leptonic final state not only allows us to cleanly reconstruct the $Z$ boson but also to mitigate the otherwise overwhelming backgrounds. Furthermore, while LEP could only scan a limited range of dilepton invariant masses, there is no such limitation at the LHC. Consequently, this allows us to make full use of the interference between the amplitudes mediated by a $Z$ boson and a photon. Using the full high-luminosity LHC dataset of $3~\text{ab}^{-1}$ and with the current flavor and charge-tagging capabilities would allow us to reject the wrong-sign right-handed coupling solution by 4$\sigma$. Further improving the charge-tagging efficiency would disfavor it by 6$\sigma$.Comment: 18 + 8 pages, 9 figure

DirectDM: a tool for dark matter direct detection

We provide a Mathematica package, DirectDM, that takes as input the Wilson coefficients of the relativistic effective theory describing the interactions of dark matter with quarks, gluons and photons, and matches it onto an effective theory describing the interactions of dark matter with neutrons and protons. The nonperturbative matching is performed at leading order in a chiral expansion. The one-loop QCD and QED renormalization-group evolution from the electroweak scale down to the hadronic scale, as well as finite corrections at the heavy quark thresholds are taken into account. We also provide an interface with the package DMFormFactor so that, starting from the relativistic effective theory, one can directly obtain the event rates for direct detection experiments.Comment: 19 pages, 2 figures; the companion code can be downloaded from https://directdm.github.i

Renormalization Group Effects in Dark Matter Interactions

We present a renormalization-group (RG) analysis of dark matter interactions with the standard model, where dark matter is allowed to be a component of an electroweak multiplet, and has a mass at or below the electroweak scale. We consider, in addition to the gauge interactions, the complete set of effective operators for dark matter interactions with the standard model above the weak scale, up to and including mass dimension six. We calculate the RG evolution of these operators from the high scale Lambda down to the weak scale, and perform the matching to the tower of effective theories below the weak scale. We also summarize the RG evolution below the weak scale and the matching to the nonrelativistic nuclear interactions. We present several numerical examples and show that in certain cases the dark matter - nucleus scattering rate can change by orders of magnitude when the electroweak running is included.Comment: 62 pages, 16 figures. Updated references; version published in JHE

Chiral Effective Theory of Dark Matter Direct Detection

We present the effective field theory for dark matter interactions with the visible sector that is valid at scales of O(1 GeV). Starting with an effective theory describing the interactions of fermionic and scalar dark matter with quarks, gluons and photons via higher dimension operators that would arise from dimension-five and dimension-six operators above electroweak scale, we perform a nonperturbative matching onto a heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory that describes dark matter interactions with light mesons and nucleons. This is then used to obtain the coefficients of the nuclear response functions using a chiral effective theory description of nuclear forces. Our results consistently keep the leading contributions in chiral counting for each of the initial Wilson coefficients.Comment: 64 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables. Fixed typographical error

Nonstandard Yukawa Couplings and Higgs Portal Dark Matter

We study the implications of non-standard Higgs Yukawa couplings to light quarks on Higgs-portal dark matter phenomenology. Saturating the present experimental bounds on up-quark, down-quark, or strange-quark Yukawa couplings, the predicted direct dark matter detection scattering rate can increase by up to four orders of magnitude. The effect on the dark matter annihilation cross section, on the other hand, is subleading unless the dark matter is very light -- a scenario that is already excluded by measurements of the Higgs invisible decay width. We investigate the expected size of corrections in multi-Higgs-doublet models with natural flavor conservation, the type-II two-Higgs-doublet model, the Giudice-Lebedev model of light quark masses, minimal flavor violation new physics models, Randall-Sundrum, and composite Higgs models. We find that an enhancement in the dark matter scattering rate of an order of magnitude is possible. Finally, we point out that a discovery of Higgs-portal dark matter could lead to interesting bounds on the light-quark Yukawa couplings.Comment: 38 pages, 12 figures; minor mistake in numerics fixed, conclusions unchanged; references adde

Higgs Assisted Q-balls from Pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone Bosons

Motivated by recent constructions of TeV-scale strongly-coupled dynamics, either associated with the Higgs sector itself as in pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson (pNGB) Higgs models or in theories of asymmetric dark matter, we show that stable solitonic Q- balls can be formed from light pion-like pNGB fields carrying a conserved global quantum number in the presence of the Higgs field. We focus on the case of thick-wall Q-balls, where solutions satisfying all constraints are shown to exist over a range of parameter values. In the limit that our approximations hold, the Q-balls are weakly bound and parametrically large, and the form of the interactions of the light physical Higgs with the Q-ball is determined by the breaking of scale symmetry.Comment: 24 pages, 6 figures, 1 tabl

Constraining Light-Quark Yukawa Couplings from Higgs Distributions

We propose a novel strategy to constrain the bottom and charm Yukawa couplings by exploiting LHC measurements of transverse momentum distributions in Higgs production. Our method does not rely on the reconstruction of exclusive final states or heavy-flavour tagging. Compared to other proposals it leads to an enhanced sensitivity to the Yukawa couplings due to distortions of the differential Higgs spectra from emissions which either probe quark loops or are associated to quark-initiated production. We derive constraints using data from LHC Run I, and we explore the prospects of our method at future LHC runs. Finally, we comment on the possibility of bounding the strange Yukawa coupling.Comment: Added analysis of the Higgs transverse momentum distribution. Version published in Physical Review Letter