Search for `invisible' Higgs signals at LHC via Associated Production with Gauge Bosons

Abstract

A light Higgs boson with substantial branching ratio into invisible channels can occur in a variety of models with: light neutralinos, spontaneously broken lepton number, radiatively generated neutrino masses, additional singlet scalar(s) and/or right handed neutrinos in the extra dimensions of TeV scale gravity. We study the observability of the WH and ZH modes at LHC with H decaying invisibly, by carrying out a detailed simulation with two event generators HERWIG and PYTHIA and realistic detector simulations (GETJET and CMSJET). We find that the signal with `single lepton plus missing $E_T$' resulting from WH production suffers from a very large background due to the (off-shell) $W^{\ast }$ production via the Drell-Yan process. In contrast, the ZH mode provides a clean signal in the `dilepton plus missing $E_T$' channel. By exploiting this second signature, we show that invisible branching ratios of Higgs bosons, ${BR}_{inv}$, larger than $\sim 0.42(0.70)$ can be probed at 5$\sigma$ level for $M_H=120$(160) GeV respectively, assuming an accumulated luminosity of L=100 fb${}^{-1}$.

Comments: 12 pages, 2 Figures, LateX; minor revision; few references added; version to appear in PLB