A new Higgs boson with electron-muon flavor-violating couplings

Abstract

A recent CMS search for a new resonance decaying to eμ in the mass range 110 GeV to 160 GeV finds an excess of events at 146 GeV. We interpret the search results in the context of the type-III two-Higgs-doublet-model. We find that the excess is moderately constrained by low-energy lepton-flavor-violation constraints, in particular the μ→eγ decay. We also find the bounds from CMS search can be superior to the low-energy constraints for the scalar mass between 110 GeV and 150 GeV, suggesting the importance of this mass range for future searches. © 2023 The Author(s)