Higgs couplings: disentangling new physics with off-shell measurements.

After the discovery of a scalar resonance, resembling the Higgs boson, its couplings have been extensively studied via the measurement of various production and decay channels on the invariant mass peak. Recently, the possibility of using off-shell measurements has been suggested: in particular, the CMS Collaboration has published results based on the high-invariant mass cross section of the process gg→ZZ, which contains a contribution from the Higgs boson. While this measurement has been interpreted as a constraint on the Higgs width after very specific assumptions are taken on the Higgs couplings, in this Letter, we show that a much more model-independent interpretation is possible.