Radion effects on the production of an intermediate-mass scalar and Z at LEP II

Abstract

We have studied the $e^+ e^- \to Z \phi_i \to Z jj$ process, where $\phi_i$ is the Higgs and/or radion bosons. The implications of the radion effects on the preliminary ALEPH data are also discussed. The case of the lighter radion than Higgs boson is disfavored by the ALEPH analyses of the $b$ tagged four-jet data, since the radion predominantly decays into two gluon jets due to the QCD trace anomaly. If the radion is highly degenerate in mass with the Higgs, the cross section can be increased more than at one sigma level, with natural scale of the vacuum expectation value of the radion.