Probing heavy Higgs boson models with a TeV linear collider

Abstract

There has been a great development in our understanding of particle physics at the weak scale in recent years. Precision electroweak observables have played a key role in this process and their values are consistent, within the standard model (SM) interpretation, with a light Higgs boson with a mass lower than about 200 GeV. If new physics were responsible for the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking there would, quite generally, be modifications to this prediction induced by the nonstandard contributions to the precision electroweak observables. In this paper, we analyze the experimental signatures of a heavy Higgs boson at linear colliders. We show that a linear collider, with a center of mass energy √ s ≲ 1 TeV , would be very useful to probe the basic ingredients of well motivated heavy Higgs boson models: a relatively heavy SM-like Higgs boson, together with either extra scalar or fermionic degrees of freedom, or with the mixing of the third generation quarks with nonstandard heavy quark modes.