Phenomenology of Spontaneous CP-violation in 2HDMs

Abstract

Spontaneous CP violation (SCPV) provides an attractive possibility for explaining the origin of CP violation and the observed CP-violating phenomena in the quark sector. We investigate SCPV in the two-Higgs-doublet model as one of its simplest realizations, in which the additional Higgs bosons are necessarily non-decoupling and flavor misalignment in the Yukawa sector is required. The non-decoupling Higgs sector predicts sizable deviations from the Standard Model predictions even in the Higgs alignment limit: the decay rates of the discovered Higgs boson into $γγ$ and $Zγ$ can deviate by at least about $-10\%$ and $-4\%$, respectively, while the trilinear Higgs self-coupling can receive $\mathcal{O}(100)\%$ corrections. We consider a scenario in which the down-type quark and charged-lepton Yukawa matrices are flavor aligned, while flavor-violating interactions are allowed in the up-type quark sector to reproduce the Kobayashi-Maskawa phase. We explore the viable parameter space by imposing theoretical constraints together with experimental constraints from electroweak precision observables, flavor measurements, electric dipole moments, and LHC data. We find that a sizable flavor-violating top-charm Yukawa coupling remains allowed, giving rise to distinctive LHC signatures, including same-sign top-quark and three-top production as well as scalar cascade decays. We also find that the deviation in the trilinear Higgs self-coupling is correlated with the decay patterns of the additional neutral Higgs bosons, providing a connection between precision Higgs measurements and direct searches for the additional Higgs bosons. Our results demonstrate the importance of combining searches for additional Higgs bosons with precision Higgs measurements, complemented by flavor and electric-dipole-moment experiments, to probe SCPV.