Probing lepton flavour violation with Higgs boson decays H-> li+lj

Abstract

We evaluate the lepton flavour violating (LFV) decays of HIggs bosons H->li+lj in several extensions of the SM, including both the effective lagrangian approach and several specific models. For the effective lagrangian case, we focus on dimension-six operators that induce LFV vertices for the Higgs and or Z bosons. For those operators whose coefficients can not be constrained by present data, LFV Higgs decays can have a B.R. of order 0.1-0.01. Those cases when current bounds apply, induce strong bounds for e-mu transitions, and the b.r. for H->e mu is of order 10^-9; however H->tau mu, tau e, can have B.R. of order 0.1. In the case of the two-higgs doublet model III, we obtain a similar B.R. for H-> tau mu, tau e, whereas in the SM with massive neutrinos and the minimal SUSY-SM the corresponding B.R. are very suppressed.