Flavor and CP violation in Higgs decays

Abstract

Flavor violating interactions of the Higgs boson are a generic feature of models with extended electroweak symmetry breaking sectors. Here, we investigate CP violation in these interactions, which can arise from interference of tree-level and 1-loop diagrams. We compute the CP asymmetry in flavor violating Higgs decays in an effective field theory with only one Higgs boson and in a general Type-III Two Higgs Doublet Model (2HDM). We find that large (~ O(10%)) asymmetries are possible in the 2HDM if one of the extra Higgs bosons has a mass similar to the Standard Model Higgs. For the poorly constrained decay modes h -> tau mu and h -> tau e, this implies that large lepton charge asymmetries could be detectable at the LHC. We quantify this by comparing the sensitivity of the LHC to existing direct and indirect constraints. Interestingly, detection prospects are best if Higgs mixing is relatively small - a situation that is preferred by the current data. Nevertheless, CP violation in h -> tau mu or h -> tau e will only be observable if nonzero rates for these decay modes are measured very soon.