Low-mass Higgs decays to four leptons at one loop and beyond

Abstract

The ongoing searches for Higgs-boson signals in data taken at the CERN LHC and the Fermilab Tevatron crucially rely on the decay channels H -> Z l l and H -> W l nu. We present a precision study of the partial widths of these decay channels including the full one-loop electroweak corrections and the dominant contributions at two and three loops, of O(G_F^2 m_t^4), O(G_F m_t^2 alpha_s), and O(G_F m_t^2 alpha_s^2). Since the invariant mass of the off-shell intermediate boson is relatively low in the mass window 115 GeV < m_H < 129 GeV of current interest, lepton mass effects are relevant, especially for the tau lepton.

Comments: 18 pages, 4 figures, numerical analysis updated using 2012 PDG input, references added, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. D