Higgs Boson Decays to tau-pairs in the s-channel at a Muon Collider

Abstract

We study the observability of the \tautau decay mode of a Higgs boson produced in the $s$-channel at a muon collider. We find that the spin correlations of the \tautau in $\tau\to \pi\nu_{\tau}, \rho\nu_{\tau}$ decays are discriminative between the Higgs boson signal and the Standard Model background. Observation of the predicted distinctive distribution can confirm the spin-0 nature of the Higgs resonance. The relative coupling strength of the Higgs boson to $b$ and $\tau$ can also be experimentally determined.Comment: to appear in PL