Discovering the twin Higgs boson with displaced decays
The twin Higgs mechanism keeps the scalar sector of the Standard Model (SM) natural while remaining consistent with the nonobservation of new colored particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In this construction the heavy twin Higgs boson provides a portal between the SM particles and the twin sector, but is quite challenging to discover at colliders. In the fraternal twin Higgs setup, where light twin quarks are absent, we study a novel discovery channel for the heavy twin Higgs boson by considering its decay to a pair of light Higgs bosons, one of which subsequently decays to glueball states in the twin sector, leading to displaced vertex signatures. We estimate the sensitivity of existing LHC searches in this channel, and assess the discovery potential of the high luminosity (HL) LHC. We show that the glueballs probed by these searches are outside the sensitivity of existing searches for exotic decays of the light Higgs boson. In addition, we demonstrate that the displaced signals we consider probe a region of heavy Higgs masses beyond the reach of prompt signals. We also comment on the possibility of probing the input parameters of the microscopic physics and providing a way to test the twin Higgs mechanism with this channel.