Deciphering the CP nature of the 750 GeV resonance

Abstract The recently observed excess in diphoton events at around 750 GeV can be satisfactorily described in terms of a new spin-0 real singlet with effective interactions to the gauge bosons. In this letter we first review the current constraints on this setup. We further explore the production in association with a gauge boson. We show the potential of this channel to unravel current flat directions in the allowed parameter space. We then study the potential of two different asymmetries for disentangling the CP nature of such a singlet in both gluon fusion and vector-boson fusion. For this matter, we perform an estimation of the efficiency for selecting signal and background events in eight different decay modes, namely 4 l , 2 j 2 l , 2 j l E T , 2 γ 2 j , 4 l 2 j , 2 l γ 2 j , 4 j 2 l and 4 j l E T . We emphasize that the very different couplings of this new singlet to the Standard Model particles as well as the larger mass provide a distinctive phenomenology with respect to Higgs searches. We finally show that a large region of the parameter space could be tested within the current LHC run, the dominant channel being 2 γ 2 j .