Higgs FCNC h -> t* c decay at the muon collider
Abstract
We study the discovery potential of the flavor-changing neutral coupling (FCNC) htc of the Higgs boson and the top quark through the rare tree-body decay h -> Wbc at Muon colliders for a light Higgs boson with mass 114 < mh < 145 GeV. This decay mode may compete with the SM background induced by the hWW coupling in some models with a tree-level htc coupling and with models that predict this coupling at the one-loop level in the range 10-2 - 10-1. A future muon collider could test the scalar FCNC decay t -> hc via Higgs decay h -> t* c -> b W+ c down to values of the coupling gtc=0.5 (that are equivalent to BR(t -> hc) = 5 x 10-3). The LHC could probe values of gtc one order of magnitude smaller, unless other processes beyond the SM appear that through intense multi jet activity may clutter the t -> hc signal.