Determining the Higgs spin and parity in the diphoton decay channel

Understand

We calculate the diphoton distribution in the decay of arbitrary spin-0 and spin-2 bosons produced from gluon fusion, taking into account the fact that gluons inside an unpolarized proton are generally linearly polarized.

• The gluon polarization brings about a difference in the transverse momentum distribution of positive and negative parity states.
• At the same time, it causes the azimuthal distribution of the photon pair to be non-isotropic for several spin-2 coupling hypotheses, allowing one to distinguish these from the isotropic scalar and pseudoscalar distributions.