Impact of new experimental data on the C2HDM: the strong interdependence between LHC Higgs data and the electron EDM

Abstract

Abstract The complex two-Higgs doublet model (C2HDM) is one of the simplest extensions of the Standard Model with a source of CP-violation in the scalar sector. It has a $${\mathbb{Z}}_{2}$$ symmetry, softly broken by a complex coefficient. There are four ways to implement this symmetry in the fermion sector, leading to models known as Type-I, Type-II, Lepton-Specific and Flipped. In the latter three models, there is a priori the surprising possibility that the 125 GeV Higgs boson couples mostly as a scalar to top quarks, while it couples mostly as a pseudoscalar to bottom quarks. This “maximal” scenario was still possible with the data available in 2017. Since then, there have been more data on the 125 GeV Higgs boson, direct searches for CP-violation in angular correlations of τ-leptons produced in Higgs boson decays, new results on the electron electric dipole moment, new constraints from LHC searches for additional Higgs bosons and new results on b → sγ transitions. Highlighting the crucial importance of the physics results of LHC’s Run 2, we combine all these experiments and show that the “maximal” scenario is now excluded in all models. Still, one can have a pseudoscalar component in $$h\tau \overline{\tau }$$ couplings in the Lepton-Specific case as large as 87% of the scalar component for all mass orderings of the neutral scalar bosons.