Resolving electron and muon $g-2$ within the 2HDM

Abstract

Recent precise measurement of the electron anomalous magnetic moment (AMM) adds to the longstanding tension of the muon AMM and together strongly point towards physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM). In this work, we propose a solution to both anomalies in an economical fashion via a light scalar that emerges from a second Higgs doublet and resides in the $\mathcal{O}(10)$-MeV to $\mathcal{O}(1)$-GeV mass range yielding the right sizes and signs for these deviations due to one-loop and two-loop dominance for the muon and the electron, respectively. A scalar of this type is subject to a number of various experimental constraints, however, as we show, it can remain sufficiently light by evading all experimental bounds and has the great potential to be discovered in the near-future low-energy experiments. The analysis provided here is equally applicable to any BSM scenario for which a light scalar is allowed to have sizable flavor-diagonal couplings to the charged leptons. In addition to the light scalar, our theory predicts the existence of a nearly degenerate charged scalar and a pseudoscalar, which have masses of the order of the electroweak scale. We analyze possible ways to probe new-physics signals at colliders and find that this scenario can be tested at the LHC by looking at the novel process $pp \to H^\pm H^\pm jj \to l^\pm l^\pm j j + {E\!\!\!\!/}_{T}$ via same-sign pair production of charged Higgs bosons.