  We consider the impact of new exotic colored and/or charged matter
interacting through the Higgs portal on Standard Model Higgs boson searches at
the LHC. Such Higgs portal couplings can induce shifts in the effective
Higgs-gluon-gluon and Higgs-photon-photon couplings, thus modifying the Higgs
production and decay patterns. We consider two possible interpretations of the
current LHC Higgs searches based on ~ 5/fb of data at each detector: 1) a Higgs
boson in the mass range (124-126) GeV and 2) a `hidden' heavy Higgs boson which
is underproduced due to the suppression of its gluon fusion production cross
section. We first perform a model independent analysis of the allowed sizes of
such shifts in light of the current LHC data. As a class of possible candidates
for new physics which gives rise to such shifts, we investigate the effects of
new scalar multiplets charged under the Standard Model gauge symmetries. We
determine the scalar parameter space that is allowed by current LHC Higgs
searches, and compare with complementary LHC searches that are sensitive to the
direct production of colored scalar states.
