Implications of a non-standard light Higgs boson

Analyses of the vacuum stability of the electroweak theory indicate that new physics occur at a scale of the order of 1 TeV if a light Higgs is discovered at LEP II. In this paper, we parameterize the effects of new physics in the effective Lagrangian approach and examine its implication on the Higgs boson production at LEP II. We consider the effect of a higher dimension operator on the Higgs potential and calculate the lower bound on the Higgs boson mass from the requirement of vacuum stability. We show that if a Higgs boson is seen at LEP II, then under favourable conditions the deviation of the production cross section from the standard model value could be significant and therefore the presence of the new physics is detectable at LEP II.