On Distinguishing Radions From Higgs Bosons

Abstract

Radion couplings are almost identical to Higgs boson couplings, making it very difficult to distinguish the two states when the radion mass and vacuum expectation value are similar to those of the Higgs boson. The only real difference lies in the fact that the coupling of radions to off-shell fermions is proportional to the momentum rather than the mass of the fermion. This extra contribution gets cancelled in all tree-level processes and shows up only in loop-induced processes like Phi -> gamma gamma and Phi -> gg. We perform a careful calculation of the branching ratios and establish that they can prove crucial in clearly distinguishing a radion from a Higgs boson. This claim is made concrete by evaluating the exclusive cross-sections in a radiative process involving elementary scalars.