Extra Higgs bosons in ttbar production at the LHC

The top quark has a large Yukawa coupling with the Higgs boson. In the usual extensions of the standard model the Higgs sector includes extra scalars, which also tend to couple strongly with the top quark. Unlike the Higgs, these fields have a natural mass above 2m_t, so they could introduce anomalies in ttbar production at the LHC. We study their effect on the ttbar invariant mass distribution at sqrt{s}=7 TeV. We focus on the bosons (H,A) of the minimal SUSY model and on the scalar field (r) associated to the new scale f in Little Higgs (LH) models. We show that in all cases the interference with the standard amplitude dominates over the narrow-width contribution. As a consequence, the mass difference between H and A or the contribution of an extra T-quark loop in LH models become important effects in order to determine if these fields are observable there. We find that a 1 fb^{-1} luminosity could probe the region tan beta \le 3 of SUSY and v/(sqrt{2}f) \ge 0.3 in LH models.Comment: 18 pages, version to appear in PR

The light Higgs in supersymmetric models with Higgs triplets

In supersymmetric models the presence of Higgs triplets introduce new quartic interactions for the doublets that may raise the mass of the lightest CP-even field up to 205 GeV. We show that the complete effect of the triplets can be understood by decoupling them from the minimal sector and then analyzing the vacuum and the spectrum of the two-Higgs doublet model that results. We find that the maximum value of m_h is only achieved in a very definite region of the parameter space. In this region, however, radiative corrections decrease the bound to 190 GeV.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figur

Heavy neutrino decays at MiniBooNE

It has been proposed that a sterile neutrino \nu_h with m_h \approx 50 MeV and a dominant decay mode (\nu_h -> \nu\gamma) may be the origin of the experimental anomaly observed at LSND. We define a particular model that could also explain the MiniBooNE excess consistently with the data at other neutrino experiments (radiative muon capture at TRIUMF, T2K, or single photon at NOMAD). The key ingredients are (i) its long lifetime (\tau_h\approx 3-7x10^{-9} s), which introduces a 1/E dependence with the event energy, and (ii) its Dirac nature, which implies a photon preferably emitted opposite to the beam direction and further reduces the event energy at MiniBooNE. We show that these neutrinos are mostly produced through electromagnetic interactions with nuclei, and that T2K observations force BR(\nu_h -> \nu_\tau\gamma) \le 0.01 \approx BR(\nu_h -> \nu_\mu\gamma). The scenario implies then the presence of a second sterile neutrino \nu_{h'} which is lighter, longer lived and less mixed with the standard flavors than \nu_h. Since such particle would be copiously produced in air showers through (\nu_h -> \nu_{h'}\gamma) decays, we comment on the possible contamination that its photon-mediated elastic interactions with matter could introduce in dark matter experiments.Comment: 18 pages, typo in Eq.(6) correcte