  We study a class of nonstandard interactions of the newly discovered 125 GeV
Higgs-like resonance that are especially interesting probes of new physics:
flavor violating Higgs couplings to leptons and quarks. These interaction can
arise in many frameworks of new physics at the electroweak scale such as two
Higgs doublet models, extra dimensions, or models of compositeness. We rederive
constraints on flavor violating Higgs couplings using data on rare decays,
electric and magnetic dipole moments, and meson oscillations. We confirm that
flavor violating Higgs boson decays to leptons can be sizeable with, e.g., h ->
tau mu and h -> tau e branching ratios of order 10% perfectly allowed by low
energy constraints. We estimate the current LHC limits on h -> tau mu and h ->
tau e decays by recasting existing searches for the SM Higgs in the tau-tau
channel and find that these bounds are already stronger than those from rare
tau decays. We also show that these limits can be improved significantly with
dedicated searches and we outline a possible search strategy. Flavor violating
Higgs decays therefore present an opportunity for discovery of new physics
which in some cases may be easier to access experimentally than flavor
conserving deviations from the Standard Model Higgs framework.
