High energy probes of Higgs self-coupling via $W$ boson fusion at future lepton colliders

Abstract

We investigate the sensitivity to the Higgs self-coupling through $W$ boson fusion di-Higgs production at CLIC with a center-of-mass energy of $\sqrt{s}=3$ TeV. We study the interplay between the Higgs self-coupling modifier ($\kappa_{\lambda}$) and Higgs-gauge coupling modifiers ($\kappa_{V}$ and $\kappa_{2V}$) within the $\kappa$ framework. To enhance the separation between signal and background, we develop a graph neural network (GNN) based classifier that achieves a signal significance of $\mathscr{Z}\approx 20~\sigma$ at $5~\mathrm{ab}^{-1}$, substantially exceeding projected HL-LHC sensitivity. Our results demonstrate that high-energy lepton colliders, combined with graph-based machine learning, provide excellent sensitivity to the Higgs self-coupling and offer a powerful probe of new physics in the electroweak sector, disentangling linearly and non-linearly realized electroweak symmetry breaking.