Lepton Flavor Changing Higgs decays in the Littlest Higgs Model with T-parity

Abstract

We calculate loop induced lepton flavor violating Higgs decays in the Littlest Higgs model with T-parity. We find that a finite amplitude is obtained only when all contributions from the T-odd lepton sector are included. This is in contrast to lepton flavor violating processes mediated by gauge bosons where the partners of the right-handed mirror leptons can be decoupled from the spectrum. These partners are necessary to cancel the divergence in the Higgs mass introduced by the mirror leptons but are otherwise unnecessary and assumed to be decoupled in previous phenomenological studies. Furthermore, as we emphasize, including the partner leptons in the spectrum also introduces a new source of lepton flavor violation via their couplings to the physical pseudo-Goldstone electroweak triplet scalar. Although this extra source also affects lepton flavor changing gauge transitions, it decouples from these amplitudes in the limit of heavy mass for the partner leptons. We find that the corresponding Higgs branching ratio into taus and muons can be as large as $\sim 0.2 \times 10^{-6}$ for T-odd masses of the order a few TeV, a demanding challenge even for the high luminosity LHC.