Strange Couplings to the Higgs

Abstract

We explored the coupling of strange quark to the state of mass close to 126 GeV recently observed by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC. An enhanced coupling relative to the expectations for a SM Higgs has the effect of increasing both the inclusive production cross section and the partial decay width into jets. For very large modifications, the latter dominates and the net rate into non-jet decay modes such as diphotons is suppressed, with the result that one can use observations of the diphoton decay mode to place an upper limit on the strange quark coupling. We find that the current observations of the diphoton decay mode imply that the coupling of the new resonance to strange quark can be at most ~ 50 times the SM expectation at the 95 % C.L., if one assumes at most a O(1) modification of the coupling to gluons.