Speaker
Description
The final-state interactions of a Higgs boson with a dense quark-gluon medium are studied. The dominant Higgs-parton scattering processes, $g\,H\to\,g\,g,Q\,\bar{Q}$, have a total cross section $\sigma_{Hg}\approx $1-10$ \mu b$, in the kinematical range of relevance at current and future hadron colliders. Such medium-induced enhancement of the Higgs decays into a pair of jets leads to an effective depletion of its final visible yields in the standard $H\to \gamma\gamma,ZZ^*(4\ell)$ discovery channels, compared to the accurately known theoretical predictions for its production and decay in the absence of final-state interactions. By embedding a Higgs boson, with transverse momenta spectra computed at NNLO+NNLL accuracy, in a quark-gluon medium described by a 2D+1 viscous hydrodynamics expansion with the lattice-QCD equation of state, we present realistic estimates of the expected Higgs boson suppressed yields as a function of its transverse momentum $p_{\rm T}$, and the total particle
density in pp, pPb, and PbPb collisions at LHC and FCC energies. Yields suppressions of up to 15\%
are expected, mostly in the region $p_{\rm T}$ below $50$ GeV.
