Radiative return for heavy Higgs boson at a muon collider

Abstract

Higgs boson properties could be studied with a high accuracy at a muon collider via the s-channel resonant production. We consider the situation where the center-of-mass energy of the muon collider is off the resonance above the Higgs mass. We discuss the discovery potential for a generic heavy Higgs boson and compare different production mechanisms, including the “radiative return,” Z-boson associated production and heavy Higgs pair production. These production mechanisms do not sensitively rely on a priori knowledge of the heavy Higgs boson mass. We include various types of two-Higgs-doublet models for the comparison. We conclude that the radiative return process could provide an important option for both the heavy Higgs discovery and direct measurement of invisible decays at a high energy muon collider.