• Accepted Paper

Exotic Higgs decays at a muon collider

JiJi Fan, Lingfeng Li, Tao Liu, Yanhan Wang, and Mingrui Zhou

Phys. Rev. D - Accepted 2 October, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/53hv-yxhl

Abstract

We study the sensitivity of a future muon collider to exotic Higgs decays in a minimal scenario of Standard Model (SM) augmented with a light singlet scalar S. We consider the decay h→SS and S’s subsequently decay back to SM. In particular, we focus on final states with four bottom quarks (4b), and two bottom quarks and two muons (2b2μ). Analyses are performed for two muon collider benchmark configurations: center-of-mass collision energy s=3TeV with 1ab−1 data and s=10TeV with 10ab−1 data. Machine-learning techniques are applied to suppress backgrounds and mitigate jet-combinatorics effects in both channels. We find that the 4b mode could be sensitive to the branching ratio, BR(h→SS→4b), of ${\cal O}(10^{-2})$ at 3~TeV and ${\cal O}(10^{-3})$ at 10~TeV, significantly improving upon high-luminosity LHC projections. In the Higgs-portal model with S coupling to SM only through mixing with the Higgs, the sensitivities to BR(h→SS) remain at the same level given ${\cal O}(1)$ branching fraction of S decaying into b-quarks. The 2b2μ mode benefits from a clean dimuon resonance and can probe BR(h→SS→2b2μ) down to 10−5 level at a 10TeV muon collider. But the sensitivity to BR(h→SS) will be significantly reduced due to the small branching fraction of S decaying into muons in the Higgs portal model.

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