Prospects of Searches for Anomalous Hadronic Higgs Boson Decays at the LHeC

Abstract

The future Large Hadron Electron Collider (LHeC) would enable collisions of an intense electron beam with either protons or heavy ions at the High Luminosity-Large Hadron Collider (HL- LHC). With a center of mass energy greater than a TeV and a high luminosity, the LHeC would be a new-generation collider for deep-inelastic scattering (DIS) and a significant facility for precise Higgs physics, complementing pp and electron-positron colliders. Anomalous hadronic decay signatures of the Higgs Boson, such as those into three or more partons, are challenging to detect at the LHC due to high background rates, but they may be observable at the LHeC. This paper presents the expected sensitivity of the LHeC for the decay channels $H \rightarrow 3jets$ and $H \rightarrow 4jets$, assuming an integrated luminosity of 1 ab$^{-1}$. Our analysis indicates that upper limits on the branching ratio of the Higgs Boson of 0.35 and 0.17 at 95% confidence limit for these processes are possible.