Production and detection of heavy matter anti-matter from Higgs decays

Abstract

The one-loop Higgs coupling to two gluons has been invoked in the past to estimate that the fraction of the nucleon mass which is due to the Higgs is rather small but calculable (approximately 8 percent). To test the veracity of this hypothesis, we employ the same mechanism to compute the Higgs coupling to an arbitrary stable nucleus $A$ and its anti-nucleus $\bar{A}$. We find that the physical decay rate of a Higgs into a spin zero $A\bar{A}$ pair near the threshold corresponding to the Higgs mass is quite substantial, once we include the final state Coulomb corrections as well as possible form factor effects. If true, observation of even a few such decay events would be truly spectacular (with no competing background) since we are unaware of any other interaction which might lead to the production of a very heavy nucleus accompanied by its anti nucleus in nucleon-(anti-) nucleon scattering.