Unveiling Light-Quark Yukawa Flavor Structure via Dihadron Fragmentation at Lepton Colliders
Abstract
Directly probing light-quark Yukawa couplings and their flavor structure remains a major challenge due to their smallness and overwhelming QCD backgrounds. In this Letter, we propose a theoretical framework to access these couplings at lepton colliders through transverse spin dependent azimuthal modulations in dihadron fragmentation. These modulations arise from the interference between Higgs mediated and standard model amplitudes in e^{-}e^{+}→qq[over ¯]Z, producing angular structures that are linearly sensitive to the Yukawa couplings y_{q}, in contrast to conventional observables that scale as y_{q}^{2}. By combining channels with an identified accompanying single hadron, h^{'}=π^{±},K^{±}, and p/p[over ¯], this approach cleanly disentangles the up- and down-quark Yukawa contributions, yielding typical limits at the O(10^{-4}-10^{-3}) level and establishing fragmentation dynamics as a novel and complementary probe of the Higgs flavor structure.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies
Computational Physics and Python Applications
Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions
Publication details
- Journal / source
- Physical Review Letters
- Publisher
- American Physical Society (APS)
- Volume
- 136
- Issue
- 23
- Pages
- 231901–231901
- Publication date
- 14 May 2026
- Language
- EN