- Accepted Paper
Exotic Higgs decays at a muon collider
Phys. Rev. D - Accepted 2 October, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/53hv-yxhl
Phys. Rev. D - Accepted 2 October, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/53hv-yxhl
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 . We consider the decay and ’s subsequently decay back to SM. In particular, we focus on final states with four bottom quarks (), and two bottom quarks and two muons (). Analyses are performed for two muon collider benchmark configurations: center-of-mass collision energy with data and with data. Machine-learning techniques are applied to suppress backgrounds and mitigate jet-combinatorics effects in both channels. We find that the mode could be sensitive to the branching ratio, BR, 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 coupling to SM only through mixing with the Higgs, the sensitivities to BR remain at the same level given ${\cal O}(1)$ branching fraction of decaying into -quarks. The mode benefits from a clean dimuon resonance and can probe BR down to level at a muon collider. But the sensitivity to BR will be significantly reduced due to the small branching fraction of decaying into muons in the Higgs portal model.
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