Invisible Higgs Decay at the LHeC

The possibility that the 125 GeV Higgs boson may decay into invisible non-standard-model (non-SM) particles is theoretically and phenomenologically intriguing. In this letter we investigate the sensitivity of the Large Hadron Electron Collider (LHeC) to an invisibly decaying Higgs, in its proposed high luminosity running mode. We focus on the neutral current Higgs production channel which offers more kinematical handles than its charged current counterpart. The signal contains one electron, one jet and large missing energy. With a cut-based parton level analysis, we estimate that if the $hZZ$ coupling is at its standard model (SM) value, then assuming an integrated luminosity of 1\,\mbox{ab}^{-1} the LHeC with the proposed 60 GeV electron beam (with $-0.9$ polarization) and 7 TeV proton beam is capable of probing $\mathrm{Br}(h\rightarrow E\!\!\!\!/_T)=6\%$ at $2\sigma$ level. Good lepton veto performance (especially hadronic $\tau$ veto) in the forward region is crucial to the suppression of the dominant $Wje$ background. We also explicitly point out the important role that may be played by the LHeC in probing a wide class of exotic Higgs decay processes and emphasize the general function of lepton-hadron colliders in precision study of new resonances after their discovery in hadron-hadron collisions.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures. Description of the backgrounds, analysis and results is simplified. Results unchanged with respect to v2. References update

Exotic Higgs Decay h→ϕϕ→4bh\rightarrow\phi\phi\rightarrow 4b at the LHeC

We study the exotic decay of the 125 GeV Higgs boson ($h$) into a pair of light spin-0 particles ($\phi$) which subsequently decays and results in a $4b$ final state. This decay mode is well motivated in the Next to Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (NMSSM) and extended Higgs sector models. Instead of searching at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) which are beset by large Standard Model (SM) backgrounds, we investigate this decay channel at the much cleaner Large Hadron Electron Collider (LHeC). With some simple selection cuts this channel becomes nearly free of background at this $ep$ machine, in stark contrast with the situation at the (HL-)LHC. With a parton level analysis we show that for the $\phi$ mass range $[20,60]GeV$, with $100\,fb^{-1}$ luminosity the LHeC is generally capable of constraining $C_{4b}^2\equiv\kappa_{V}^2\times\text{Br}(h\rightarrow\phi\phi)\times\text{Br}^2(\phi\rightarrow b\bar{b})$ ($\kappa_{V}$ denotes the $hVV(V=W,Z)$ coupling strength relative to the SM value) to a few percent level ($95\%$ CLs). With $1\,ab^{-1}$ luminosity $C_{4b}^2$ at a few per mille level can be probed. These sensitivities are much better than the HL-LHC performance and demonstrate the important role expected to be played by the LHeC in probing exotic Higgs decay processes, in addition to the already proposed invisible Higgs decay channel.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures. Version accepted by EPJC. Tables and figures updated after correcting a mistake in signal event generation. Results essentially unchange