Discovery Potential of Future Electron-Positron Colliders for a 95 GeV Scalar

Abstract

The Large Electron Positron collider observed an indication for a new Higgs boson with a mass around $95$\,GeV-$100$\,GeV in the process $e^+e^-\to Z^*\to ZS$ with $S\to b\bar b$. The interest in this excess re-emerged with the di-photon signature at $\approx$\,95\,GeV at the Large Hadron Collider. In fact, a combined global significance of $3.4\sigma$ is obtained once $WW$ and $\tau\tau$ signals are included in addition. In this article, we perform a feasibility study for discovering such a new scalar $S$ at future electron-positron colliders using the recoil-mass method applied to $e^{+} e^{-} \to ZS$ with $Z \rightarrow \mu^{+} \mu^{-}$ and $S \to b \bar{b}$. For this, we employ a Deep Neural Network to enhance the separation between the Standard Model background and the signal, reducing the required integrated luminosity necessary for discovery by a factor of two to three. As a result, an $SU(2)_L$ singlet Higgs with a mass of $\approx$\,95\,GeV can be observed with more than 5$\sigma$ significance at a 250\,GeV centre-of-mass energy collider with $5~ {\rm ab}^{-1}$ integrated luminosity if it has a mixing angle of at least $0.1$ with the Standard Model Higgs, which means that a discovery can be achieved within the whole 95\% confidence-level region preferred by Large Electron Positron excess. Furthermore, including more decay channels such as $S\to \tau\tau$ and $Z\to e^+e^-$ further enhances the discovery potential of future $e^+e^-$ accelerators, like CEPC, CLIC, FCC-ee and ILC.