Interpretation of LHC excesses in ditop and ditau channels as a 400-GeV pseudoscalar resonance

Abstract

Since the discovery in 2012 of the Higgs boson at the LHC, as the last missing piece of the Standard Model of particle physics, any hint of new physics has been intensively searched for, with no confirmation to date. There are however slight deviations from the SM that are worth investigating. The CMS collaboration has reported, in a search for heavy resonances decaying in tt¯ with a 13-TeV center-of-mass energy and a luminosity of 35.9 fb−1, deviations from the SM predictions at the 3.5σ level locally (1.9σ after the look-elsewhere effect). In addition, in the ditau final state search performed by the ATLAS collaboration at s = 13 TeV and L = 139 fb−1, deviations from the SM at the 2σ level have been also observed. Interestingly, both slight excesses are compatible with a new pseudoscalar boson with a mass around 400 GeV that couples at least to fermions of the third generation and gluons. Starting from a purely phenomenological perspective, we inspect the possibility that a 400-GeV pseudoscalar can account for these deviations and at the same time satisfy the constraints on the rest of the channels that it gives contributions to and that are analyzed by the ATLAS and CMS experiments. After obtaining the range of effective couplings compatible with all experimental measurements, we study the gauge invariant UV completions that can give rise to this type of pseudoscalar resonance, which can be accommodated in an SO(6)/SO(5) model with consistency at the 1σ level and in a SO(5) × U(1)P × U(1)X/SO(4) × U(1)X at the 2σ level, while exceedingly large quartic couplings would be necessary to account for it in a general two Higgs doublet model.