Abstract
We suggest an explanation for and explore the consequences of the excess around 95 GeV in the di-photon and di-tau invariant mass distributions recently reported by the CMS collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), together with the discrepancy that has long been observed at the Large Electron-Positron (LEP) collider in the \( b\overline{b} \) invariant mass. Interestingly, the most recent findings announced by the ATLAS collaboration do not contradict, or even support, these intriguing observations. Their search in the di-photon final state similarly reveals an excess of events within the same mass range, albeit with a bit lower significance, thereby corroborating and somewhat reinforcing the observations made by CMS.
We demonstrate that the lightest CP-even Higgs boson in the general 2-Higgs Doublet Model (2HDM) Type-III can explain simultaneously the observed excesses at approximately 1.3 σ C.L. while satisfying up-to-date theoretical and experimental constraints. Moreover, the 2HDM Type-III predicts an excess in the \( pp\to t\overline{t}{H}_{\textrm{SM}} \) production channel of the 125 GeV Higgs boson, HSM. This effect is caused by a up to 12% enhancement of the HSMtt Yukawa coupling in comparison to that predicted by the Standard Model. Such an effect can be tested at the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC), which can either discover or exclude the scenario we suggest. This unique characteristic of the 2HDM Type-III makes this scenario with the 95 GeV resonance very attractive for further theoretical and experimental investigations at the (HL-)LHC and future colliders.
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Acknowledgments
AB and SM are supported in part through the NExT Institute and STFC CG ST/L000296/1. AB would like to thank Prof. Glen Cowan for discussions around the statistical aspects of our study. The work of RB and MB is supported by the Moroccan Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research MESRSFC and CNRST Project PPR/2015/6. MB acknowledges the use of CNRST/HPC-MARWAN in completing this work. SS is supported in full by the NExT Institute.
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Belyaev, A., Benbrik, R., Boukidi, M. et al. Explanation of the hints for a 95 GeV Higgs boson within a 2-Higgs Doublet Model. J. High Energ. Phys. 2024, 209 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP05(2024)209
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP05(2024)209