Article,
Physics impact of ILC Higgs coupling measurements: the effect of theory uncertainties
(May 18, 2007)
Abstract
We study the effect of theoretical and parametric uncertainties on the
ability of future Higgs coupling measurements at the International Linear
Collider (ILC) to reveal deviations from the Standard Model (SM). To quantify
the impact of these uncertainties we plot Delta chi^2 = 25 contours for the
deviations between the SM Higgs couplings and the light Higgs couplings in the
mh-max benchmark scenario of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM).
We consider the theoretical uncertainties in the SM Higgs decay partial widths
and production cross section and the parametric uncertainties in the bottom and
charm masses and the strong coupling alpha\_s. We find that the impact of the
theoretical and parametric uncertainties is moderate in the first phase of ILC
data-taking (500 fb-1 at 350 GeV centre-of-mass energy), reducing the "reach"
in the CP-odd MSSM Higgs mass M\_A by about 10\% to \~500 GeV, while in the second
phase (1000 fb-1 at 1000 GeV) these uncertainties are larger than the
experimental uncertainties and reduce the reach in M\_A by about a factor of
two, from \~1200 down to \~600 GeV. The bulk of the effect comes from the
parametric uncertainties in m\_b and alpha\_s, followed by the theoretical
uncertainty in Gamma\_b.
