Higgs couplings: disentangling New Physics with off-shell measurements

Abstract

After the discovery of a scalar resonance, resembling the Higgs boson, its couplings have been extensively studied via the measurement of various production and decay channels on the invariant mass peak. Recently, it has been suggested the possibility to use off-shell measurements: in particular, CMS has published results based on the high- invariant mass cross section of the process $gg \to ZZ$, which contains the contribution of the Higgs. While this measurement has been interpreted as a constraint on the Higgs width after very specific assumptions are taken on the Higgs couplings, in this letter we show that a much more model-independent interpretation is possible.