Search for exclusive Higgs and Z boson decays to ωγ and Higgs boson decays to K*γ with the ATLAS detector
Searches for the exclusive decays of the Higgs boson to an ω meson and a photon or a Κ * meson and a photon can probe flavour-conserving and flavour-violating Higgs boson couplings to light quarks, respectively. Searches for these decays, along with the analogous Z boson decay to an ω meson and a photon, are performed with a pp collision data sample corresponding to integrated luminosities of up to 134 fb -1 collected at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The obtained 95% confidence-level upper limits on the respective branching fractions are $\mathscr{B}$(H → ω$\gamma$) < 5.5 x 10 -4 , $\mathscr{B}$(H → Κ *$\gamma$) < 2.2 x 10 -4 and $\mathscr{B}$(Z → ω$\gamma$) 3.9 x 10 -6 . The limits for H → ω$\gamma$ and Z → ω$\gamma$ are 370 times and 140 times the Standard Model expected values, respectively. The result for Z → ω$\gamma$ corresponds to a two-orders-of-magnitude improvement over the limit obtained by the DELPHI experiment at LEP.