Probing the electron Yukawa coupling via resonant Higgs boson production at FCC-ee via $e^+e^- \to H \to WW^*$ in lepton-plus-jets final states

Abstract

We report a detailed simulation study of the search for $s$-channel Higgs boson production in $e^+e^-$ collisions at a center-of-mass (c.m.) energy of $\sqrt{s}=125\,\mathrm{GeV}$ at the CERN Future Circular Collider (FCC-ee), as a means to constrain the electron Yukawa coupling, $y_e$. The process of interest is $e^+e^-\to H\to WW^*\to \ell^\pm\nu + jj$ with four different $WW^*$ final states considered, involving both on- and off-shell $W$ bosons decaying either into dileptons ($\ell^\pm = e^\pm$ and $\mu^\pm$, including those from $\tau^\pm$ decays) or into dijets ($jj$). Signal and background events are discriminated through a multiclass gradient boosted decision tree exploiting a comprehensive set of kinematic and topological variables across the four final-state categories. Assuming a monochromatized c.m. energy spread of 4.1 MeV, yielding a $\sigma_{e^+e^-\to H} = 280\,\mathrm{ab}$ resonant cross section, and an integrated luminosity of $10\,\mathrm{ab}^{-1}$, the analysis achieves a combined statistical significance of 2.0 standard deviations. This corresponds to an upper limit on the coupling modifier $\kappa_e = y_e/y_e^{\rm SM} \lesssim 1.35$ at 95\% confidence level, and provides the most stringent constraint on the electron Yukawa coupling achieved in simulation-based studies to date.