Charming the Higgs


  Yotam Soreq [1]  ,  Tobias Golling [2]  ,  Gilad Perez [1,3]  ,  Cedric Delaunay [3,4]  
[1] Department of Particle Physics and Astrophysics, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel
[2] Department of Physics, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA
[3] CERN Physics Department, Theory Division, CH-1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland
[4] LAPTh, Universite de Savoie, CNRS, B.P.110, F-74941 Annecy-le-Vieux, France

 We show that current Higgs data permit a significantly enhanced Higgs coupling to charm pairs, comparable to the Higgs to bottom pairs coupling in the Standard Model, without resorting to additional new physics sources in Higgs production. With a mild level of the latter current data even allow for the Higgs to charm pairs to be the dominant decay channel. An immediate consequence of such a large charm coupling is a significant reduction of the Higgs signal strengths into the known final states as in particular into bottom pairs. This might reduce the visible vector-boson associated Higgs production rate to a level that could compromise the prospects of ever observing it.  We however demonstrate that a significant fraction of this reduced signal can be recovered by jet-flavor-tagging targeted towards charm-flavored jets. Finally we argue that an enhanced Higgs to charm pairs  coupling can be obtained in various new physics scenarios in the presence of only a mild accidental cancellation between various contributions.