Anomalous Higgs Boson Production and Decay

Abstract

A non-standard symmetry breaking sector may lead to derivative couplings of the Higgs boson and thereby to anomalous interactions with the electroweak gauge bosons. In the framework of gauge-invariant effective Lagrangians the resulting changes in Higgs boson production and decay mechanisms are related to anomalous triple vector boson couplings. Using low energy constraints on the dimension-six operators in the effective Lagrangian, we discuss the size of deviations from SM predictions which may be expected in Higgs boson production and decay rates. Large enhancements are allowed {\it e.g.} in the $Z \to H \gamma$ and $H\to \gamma \gamma$ partial decay widths, leading to $Z\to \gamma\gamma\gamma$ events at LEP.