Probing light quark Yukawa couplings through angularity distributions in Higgs boson decay

Abstract We propose to utilize angularity distributions in Higgs boson decay to probe light quark Yukawa couplings at e + e − colliders. Angularities τ a are a class of 2-jet event shapes with variable and tunable sensitivity to the distribution of radiation in hadronic jets in the final state. Using soft-collinear effective theory (SCET), we present a prediction of angularity distributions from Higgs decaying to quark and gluon states at e + e − colliders to NNLL + 𝒪(α s ) accuracy. Due to the different color structures in quark and gluon jets, the angularity distributions from H → $$q\overline{q }$$ and H → gg show different behaviors and can be used to constrain the light quark Yukawa couplings. We show that the upper limit of light quark Yukawa couplings could be probed to the level of ~ 15% of the bottom quark Yukawa coupling in the Standard Model in a conservative analysis window far away from nonperturbative effects and other uncertainties; the limit can be pushed to ≲ 7 – 9% with better control of the nonperturbative effects especially on gluon angularity distributions and/or with multiple angularities.