Exclusive radiative Higgs decays as probes of light-quark Yukawa couplings

2015

We present a detailed analysis of the rare exclusive Higgs-boson decays into a single vector meson and a photon and investigate the possibility of using these processes to probe the light-quark Yukawa couplings. We work with an effective Lagrangian with modified Higgs couplings to account for possible new-physics effects in a model-independent way. The h->V\gamma{} decay rate is governed by the destructive interference of two amplitudes, one of which involves the Higgs coupling to the quark anti-quark pair inside the vector meson. We derive this amplitude at next-to-leading order in \alpha_s using QCD factorization, including the resummation of large logarithmic corrections and accounting f…