Probing the fermionic Higgs portal at lepton colliders

We study the sensitivity of future electron-positron colliders to UV completions of the fermionic Higgs portal operator $H^\dagger H \bar \chi \chi$. Measurements of precision electroweak $S$ and $T$ parameters and the $e^+e^- \to Zh$ cross section at the CEPC, FCC-ee, and ILC are considered. The scalar completion of the fermionic Higgs portal is closely related to the scalar Higgs portal, and we summarize existing results. We devote the bulk of our analysis to a singlet-doublet fermion completion. Assuming the doublet is sufficiently heavy, we construct the effective field theory (EFT) at dimension-6 in order to compute contributions to the observables. We also provide full one-loop results for $S$ and $T$ in the general mass parameter space. In both completions, future precision measurements can probe the new states at the (multi-)TeV scale, beyond the direct reach of the LHC.