Flavor constraints from $pp\to Vh$ and $pp\to VW$ at the LHC

Abstract

We investigate the potential of associated Higgs $pp\to Vh$ and diboson production $pp\to VW$ channels at the LHC (with $V=W,Z$) to constrain flavor-physics operators. Within a general Effective Field Theory (EFT) framework, we derive the helicity amplitudes for these processes at high energies and identify the leading contributions from dimension-six operators involving different quark flavors. Using available LHC data, we show that these processes are sensitive to non-trivial flavor structures and provide complementary constraints to those from low-energy observables. We illustrate this synergy through an explicit comparison between our LHC bounds with electroweak precision data, and with flavor limits derived from charged-current pion and kaon decays. In particular, we show that our HL-LHC projections can probe viable EFT scenarios proposed to accommodate the discrepancies in the extraction of the Cabibbo angle.