In the realm of energy and particle physics, a team of researchers from CERN, including Andrea Del Vecchio, Jan Eysermans, Loukas Gouskos, George Iakovidis, Alexis Maloizel, Giovanni Marchiori, and Michele Selvaggi, have been exploring the potential of the Future Circular Collider (FCC-ee), a proposed particle collider that could succeed the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Their recent study focuses on the precision measurements of Higgs boson hadronic decay modes, a topic of significant interest to the energy sector due to its potential implications for understanding fundamental particles and forces.
The researchers presented their findings on the expected precision of the product of Higgs boson production cross sections and branching ratios of hadronic decays at the FCC-ee. This study is the first to provide a comprehensive determination of all major hadronic Higgs decay modes in a combined fit at future electron-positron colliders. The study considers both Higgs-strahlung (ZH) and Vector boson fusion (νν̄H) production processes, with a full treatment of interference effects in the νν̄jj final state. The researchers assumed four identical IDEA detectors collecting e⁺e⁻ collisions at center-of-mass energies of 240 and 365 GeV.
The combination of all channels across both energies, with full covariance between production and decay modes, yields a production cross-section times branching-ratio precision at the percent to per-mil level for the dominant hadronic final states (b̄b, c̄c, gg). These results are crucial for the determination of Higgs coupling projections at the FCC-ee. Notably, the study also establishes sensitivity to the rare decay H→s̄s, demonstrating that the FCC-ee has the potential to provide evidence of the strange-quark Yukawa coupling.
For the energy sector, understanding these fundamental particles and their interactions is essential for developing new technologies and improving existing ones. The precise measurements of Higgs boson hadronic decay modes could lead to advancements in particle physics, which in turn could influence energy production, storage, and transmission technologies. The research was published in the European Physical Journal C, a peer-reviewed scientific journal covering particle physics, heavy-ion physics, and related areas.
This article is based on research available at arXiv.