Visible Cascade Higgs Decays to Four Photons at Hadron Colliders

Abstract

The presence of a new singlet scalar particle a can open up new decay channels for the Higgs boson, through cascades of the form h -> 2a -> X, possibly making discovery through standard model channels impossible. If a is CP-odd, its decay products are particularly sensitive to physics beyond the standard model. Quantum effects from heavy fields can naturally make gluonic decay, a -> 2g, the dominant decay mode, resulting in a h -> 4 g decay which is difficult to observe at hadron colliders, and is allowed by LEP for m_h > 82 GeV. However, there are usually associated decays with photons, either h -> 2g 2gamma or h -> 4gamma, which are more promising. The decay h -> 2g 2gamma only allows discovery of the a particle and not the Higgs whereas h -> 4gamma is a clean channel that can discover both particles. We determine what branching ratios are required for discovery at LHC and find that with 300 fb^-1 of luminosity, a branching ratio of order 10^-4 is sufficient for a large region of Higgs masses. Due to a lower expected luminosity of ~ 8 fb^-1, discovery at the Tevatron requires more than 5 x 10^-3 in branching ratio.