Higgs boson mass bounds in the presence of a heavy fourth quark family

Abstract

We present Higgs boson mass bounds in a lattice regularization allowing thus for non-perturbative investigations. In particular, we employ a lattice modified chiral invariant Higgs-Yukawa model using the overlap operator. We show results for the upper and lower Higgs boson mass bounds in the presence of a heavy mass-degenerate quark doublet with masses ranging up to 700 GeV. We perform infinite volume extrapolations in most cases, and examine several values of the lattice cutoff. Furthermore, we argue that the lower Higgs boson mass bound is stable with respect to the addition of higher dimensional operators to the scalar field potential. Our results have severe consequences for the phenomenology of a fourth generation of quarks if a light Higgs boson is discovered at the LHC.