Higgs boson suppression in quark-gluon matter.

The final-state interactions of the Higgs boson in a dense quark-gluon medium are studied. Typical Higgs--parton scattering cross sections are found to be $sigma_{Hqg}approx$ 1--100 $mu$b in the kinematical range of relevance at current and future hadron colliders. In-medium scatterings effectively lead to an enhancement of the Higgs decays into a pair of jets, mostly via $g,Hto,g,g,Q,bar{Q}$, and thereby to a depletion of its visible yields in the $Htogammagamma,Z,Z^*(4ell)$ discovery channels compared to the accurate theoretical predictions for its production and decay in the absence of final-state interactions. By embedding Higgs bosons, with transverse momentum distributions computed at NNLO+NNLL accuracy, in an expanding quark-gluon medium modeled with 2D+1 viscous hydrodynamics with various QCD equations of state, we present realistic estimates of their suppressed yields as functions of transverse momentum $p_T^{H}$, and medium space-time size in pp, pPb, and PbPb collisions at LHC and FCC energies. A 10--20% depletion of yields is expected in central PbPb collisions, mostly for $p_T^{H}lesssim 50$ GeV.