SEMINAR

Invisible Higgs boson decays in spontaneously broken~R-parity

Prof. Jorge Romão

(CFTP)

Sala P7, IST, Edifício Pós-Graduação
Tuesday, November 30th, 2004 at 04:00 PM

Abstract

The Higgs boson may decay mainly to an invisible mode characterized by missing energy, instead of the Standard Model channels. This is a generic feature of many models here neutrino masses arise from the spontaneous breaking of ungauged lepton number at relatively low scales, such as spontaneously broken R-parity models. Taking these models as framework, we reanalyze this striking suggestion in view of the recent data on neutrino oscillations that indicate non-zero neutrino masses. We show that, despite the smallness of neutrino masses, the Higgs boson can decay mainly to the invisible Goldstone boson associated to the spontaneous breaking of lepton number. The search for invisibly decaying Higgs bosons should be taken into account in the planning of future accelerators, such as the Large Hadron Collider and the Next Linear Collider.