Prospects for Observing the Standard Model Higgs Boson Decaying into b\bar{b} Final States Produced in Weak Boson Fusion with an Associated Photon at the LHC

Abstract

One of the primary goals of the Large Hadron Collider is to understand the electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism. In the Standard Model, electroweak symmetry breaking is described by the Higgs mechanism which includes a scalar Higgs boson. Electroweak measurements constrain the Standard Model Higgs boson mass to be in the 114.4 to 157 GeV/c^2 range. Within this mass window, the Higgs predominantly decays into two b-quarks. As such, we investigate the prospect of observing the Standard Model Higgs decaying to b\bar{b} produced in weak-boson-fusion with an associated central photon. An isolated, high pt, central photon trigger is expected to be available at the ATLAS and CMS experiments. In this study, we investigated the effects originating from showering, hadronization, the underlying event model, and jet performance including b-jet calibration on the sensitivity of this channel. We found that the choice of Monte Carlo and Monte Carlo tune has a large effect on the efficacy of the central jet veto and consequently the signal significance. A signal significance of about 1.86 can be achieved for m(Higgs)=115 GeV/c^2 with 100 1/fb of integrated luminosity which correspond to one year at design luminosity at 14 TeV pp collisions.

15 pages, 32 figures

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Phenomenology of the minimal $B-L$ extension of the Standard Model: the Higgs sector
• Constraining SMEFT operators with associated $h\gamma$ production in Weak Boson Fusion
• Next-to-leading order QCD corrections to Higgs boson production in association with a photon via weak-boson fusion at the LHC
• Helicity Spinor Methods and Tree Level QCD Corrections in Higgs Production via Weak Boson Fusion