Little experimental data bears on the question of whether there is a spontaneously broken hidden sector that has no Standard Model quantum numbers. Here we discuss the prospects of finding evidence for such a hidden sector through renormalizable interactions of the Standard Model Higgs boson with a Higgs boson of the hidden sector. We find that the lightest Higgs boson in this scenario has smaller rates in standard detection channels, and it can have a sizeable invisible final state branching fraction. Details of the hidden sector determine whether the overall width of the lightest state is smaller or larger than the Standard Model width. We compute observable rates, total widths and invisible decay branching fractions within the general framework. We also introduce the “A-Higgs Model”, which corresponds to the limit of a hidden sector Higgs boson weakly mixing with the Standard Model Higgs boson. This model has only one free parameter in addition to the mass of the light Higgs state and it illustrates most of the generic phenomenology issues, thereby enabling it to be a good benchmark theory for collider searches. We end by presenting an analogous supersymmetry model with similar phenomenology, which involves hidden sector Higgs bosons interacting with MSSM Higgs bosons through D-terms.

• Received 24 October 2005

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.72.093007