Testing neutrino mass generation mechanisms from the lepton flavor violating decay of the Higgs boson

Abstract

We investigate how observations of the lepton flavor violating decay of the Higgs boson ($h\to \ell {\ell }^{\prime }$) can narrow down models of neutrino mass generation mechanisms, which were systematically studied in Refs. [1,2] by focusing on the combination of new Yukawa coupling matrices with leptons. We find that a wide class of models for neutrino masses can be excluded if evidence for $h\to \ell {\ell }^{\prime }$ is really obtained in the current or future collider experiments. In particular, simple models of Majorana neutrino masses cannot be compatible with the observation of $h\to \ell {\ell }^{\prime }$. It is also found that some of the simple models to generate masses of Dirac neutrinos radiatively can be compatible with a significant rate of the $h\to \ell {\ell }^{\prime }$ process.

Comments: 16 pages, 7 eps files, published in PLB