Search for exclusive Higgs and Z boson decays to ωγ and Higgs boson decays to K*γ with the ATLAS detector

Searches for the exclusive decays of the Higgs boson to an ω meson and a photon or a K^⁎ meson and a photon can probe flavour-conserving and flavour-violating Higgs boson couplings to light quarks, respectively. Searches for these decays, along with the analogous Z boson decay to an ω meson and a photon, are performed with a pp collision data sample corresponding to integrated luminosities of up to 134 fb⁻¹ collected at √s = TeV with the ATLAS detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The obtained 95% confidence-level upper limits on the respective branching fractions are B(H → ωγ) < 5.5 x 10^-4, B(H → K*γ) < 2.2 x 10^-4 and B (Z→ωγ) < 3.9 x 10^-6. The limits for H → ωγ and Z → ωγ are 370 times and 140 times the Standard Model expected values, respectively. The result for Z → ωγ corresponds to a two-orders-of-magnitude improvement over the limit obtained by the DELPHI experiment at LEP.