Off-shell effects in Higgs decays to heavy gauge bosons and signal-background interference in Higgs decays to photons at a linear collider

Abstract

We discuss off-shell contributions in Higgs decays to heavy gauge bosons $H\rightarrow VV^{(*)}$ with $V\in\lbrace Z,W\rbrace$ for a standard model (SM) Higgs boson for both dominant production processes $e^+e^-\rightarrow ZH\rightarrow ZVV^{(*)}$ and $e^+e^-\rightarrow \nu\bar\nu H\rightarrow \nu\bar\nu VV^{(*)}$ at a (linear) $e^+e^-$ collider. Dependent on the centre-of-mass energy off-shell effects are sizable and important for the understanding of the electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism. Moreover we shortly investigate the effects of the signal-background interference in $H\rightarrow \gamma\gamma$ decays for the Higgsstrahlung initiated process $e^+e^-\rightarrow Z\gamma\gamma$, where we report a similar shift in the invariant mass peak of the two photons as found for the LHC. For both effects we discuss the sensitivity to the total Higgs width.