Excited heavy quarkonium production in Higgs boson decays

Abstract

The rare decay channels of the Higgs boson to heavy quarkonium offer vital opportunities to explore the coupling of Higgs to heavy quarks. We study the semiexclusive decay channels of the Higgs boson to heavy quarkonia, i.e., H0→|(QQ′̄)[n]+Q̄Q′ (Q(′)=c or b quark) within the nonrelativistic quantum chromodynamics framework. In addition to the lower-level Fock state |(QQ′̄)[1S] continent, contributions of high excited states |(QQ′̄)[2S], |(QQ′̄)[3S], |(QQ′̄)[4S], |(QQ′̄)[1P], |(QQ′̄)[2P], |(QQ′̄)[3P], and |(QQ′̄)[4P] are also studied. According to our study, the contributions of high excited Fock states should be considered seriously. Differential distributions of total decay width with respect to invariant mass and angles, as well as uncertainties caused by nonperturbative hadronic nonperturbative matrix elements are discussed. If all excited heavy quarkonium states decay to the ground spin-singlet state through electromagnetic or hadronic interactions, we obtain the decay widths for |(QQ′̄) quarkonium production through H0 semiexclusive decays: 25.10-51.6%+11.6% keV for the |(bc̄)[n] meson, 3.23-62.2%+0% keV for |(cc̄)[n], and 2.36-57.1%+0% keV for |(bb̄)[n], where uncertainties are caused by adopting different nonperturbative potential models. At the future high-energy LHC (s=27 TeV), numerical results show that sizable numbers of events for those high excited states can be produced, which implies that one could also consider exploring the coupling properties of Higgs to heavy quarks in these high excited states channels, especially for the charmonium and bottomonium.