Explaining the 96 GeV Di-photon anomaly in a generic 2HDM Type-III

Abstract

Motivated by results recently reported by the CMS Collaboration about an excess in the di-photon spectrum at about 96 GeV, especially when combined with another long-standing anomaly at the same value in the bb¯ invariant mass spectrum in four-jet events collected at LEP, we show that a possible explanation to both phenomena can be found at 1σ level in a generic 2-Higgs Doublet Model (2HDM) of Type-III in presence of a specific Yukawa texture, wherein Lepton Flavour Violating (LFV) (neutral) currents are induced at tree level. Bounds from Higgs data play a major role in limiting the parameter space of this scenario, yet we find solutions with mH=125 GeV and mh=96 GeV consistent with current theoretical and experimental bounds.