Individuals have received support from the Marie-Curie program and the European Research Council and Horizon 2020 Grant, Contracts No. 675440, No. 724704, No. 752730, No. 758316, No. 765710, No. 824093, No. 884104, and COST Action CA16108 (European Union); the Leventis Foundation; the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office; the Fonds pour la Formation a la Recherche dans l’Industrie et dans l’Agriculture (FRIA-Belgium); the Agentschap voor Innovatie door Wetenschap en Technologie (IWT-Belgium); the F. R. S.-FNRS and FWO (Belgium) under the “Excellence of Science—EOS“—be.h Project No. 30820817; the Beijing Municipal Science & Technology Commission, No. Z191100007219010; the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports (MEYS) of the Czech Republic; the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (HFRI), Project No. 2288 (Greece); the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), under Germany’s Excellence Strategy—EXC 2121 “Quantum Universe”— 390833306, and under Project No. 400140256— GRK2497; the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the New National Excellence Program—ÚNKP, the NKFIH research Grants No. K 124845, No. K 124850, No. K 128713, No. K 128786, No. K 129058, No. K 131991, No. K 133046, No. K 138136, No. K 143460, No. K 143477, No. 2020-2.2.1-ED-2021-00181, and No. TKP2021-NKTA-64 (Hungary); the Council of Science and Industrial Research, India; the Latvian Council of Science; the Ministry of Education and Science, Project No. 2022/WK/14, and the National Science Center, Contracts No. Opus 2021/41/B/ST2/01369 and No. 2021/43/B/ST2/01552 (Poland); the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Grant No. CEECIND/01334/2018 (Portugal); the National Priorities Research Program by Qatar National Research Fund; MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, ERDF “a way of making Europe,” and the Programa Estatal de Fomento de la Investigación Científica y Tecnica de Excelencia María de Maeztu, Grant No. MDM-2017-0765 and Programa Severo Ochoa del Principado de Asturias (Spain); the Chulalongkorn Academic into Its 2nd Century Project Advancement Project, and the National Science, Research and Innovation Fund via the Program Management Unit for Human Resources & Institutional Development, Research and Innovation, Grant No. B05F650021 (Thailand); the Kavli Foundation; the Nvidia Corporation; the SuperMicro Corporation; the Welch Foundation, Contract C-1845; and the Weston Havens Foundation (USA).

A search for the lepton-flavor violating decay of the Higgs boson and potential additional Higgs bosons with a mass in the range 110–160 GeV to an e±μ∓ pair is presented. The search is performed with a proton-proton collision dataset at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 138fb−1. No excess is observed for the Higgs boson. The observed (expected) upper limit on the e±μ∓ branching fraction for it is determined to be 4.4(4.7)×10−5 at 95% confidence level, the most stringent limit set thus far from direct searches. The largest excess of events over the expected background in the full mass range of the search is observed at an e±μ∓ invariant mass of approximately 146 GeV with a local (global) significance of 3.8 (2.8) standard deviations.

CMS Collaboration: A. Hayrapetyan et al.

Funded by SCOAP3.

Peer reviewed