Beyond geolocating: Constraining higher dimensional operators in H → 4l with off-shell production and more

We extend the study of Higgs boson couplings in the golden gg -> H -> ZZ* -> 4l channel in two important respects. First, we demonstrate the importance of off-shell Higgs boson production (gg -> H -> ZZ* -> 4l) in determining which operators contribute to the HZZ vertex. Second, we include the five operators of lowest nontrivial dimension, including the Z(mu)Z(mu)square H and HZ(mu)square Z(mu) operators that are often neglected. We point out that the former operator can be severely constrained by the measurement of the off-shell H* -> ZZ rate and/or unitarity considerations. We provide analytic expressions for the off-peak cross sections in the presence of these five operators. On shell, the Z(mu)Z(mu)square H operator is indistinguishable from its Standard Model counterpart HZ(mu)Z(mu), while the HZ(mu)square Z(mu) operator can be probed, in particular, by the Z* invariant mass distribution.