Constraining the flavor changing Higgs couplings to the top-quark at the LHC

Abstract

We study the flavor-changing couplings of the Higgs-boson with the top-quark using the processes: (a) pp --> tt, (b) pp --> t_bar j, and, (c) pp --> t_bar j h at the LHC in light of current discovery of a 126 GeV Higgs-Boson. Sensitivities for the flavor-changing couplings are estimated using the LHC data that was collected until spring 2013. It is found that the process (c) is the most capable of yielding the best upper bound on the flavor-changing couplings with 2 sigma level sensitivities of {|xi_{tc}^2 + xi_{tu}^2|}^{1/2} <= 4.2 x 10^{-3} and <= 1.7 x 10^{-3} resulting from t --> b l nu_l, h --> jj with the 7 TeV and 8 TeV centre-of-mass energies respectively using existing data from the LHC. The corresponding bounds from h --> b b_bar are worse by a factor of about 1.8.

19 Latex Pages, 2 Figures, 6 Tables, More SM backgrounds, corrected some typos and errors, added h->2j detection mode, further improvements and a new subsection on 14 TeV was added. More refs. were incorporated