Singular ways to search for the Higgs boson

Abstract

The discovery or exclusion of the fundamental standard scalar is a hot topic, given the data of LEP, the Tevatron and the LHC, as well as the advanced status of the pertinent theoretical calculations. With the current statistics at the hadron colliders, the workhorse decay channel, at all relevant H masses, is H to WW, followed by W to light leptons. Using phase-space singularity techniques, we construct and study a plethora of "singularity variables" meant to facilitate the difficult tasks of separating signal and backgrounds and of measuring the mass of a putative signal. The simplest singularity variables are not invariant under boosts along the collider's axes and the simulation of their distributions requires a good understanding of parton distribution functions, perhaps not a serious shortcoming during the boson hunting season. The derivation of longitudinally boost-invariant variables, which are functions of the four charged-lepton observables that share this invariance, is quite elaborate. But their use is simple and they are, in a kinematical sense, optimal.

19 pages, including 21 figures

References in corpus (4)

• PYTHIA 6.4 Physics and Manual
• Combined results of searches for the standard model Higgs boson in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV
• Combined search for the Standard Model Higgs boson using up to 4.9 fb-1 of pp collision data at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV with the ATLAS detector at the LHC
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Cited by in corpus (6)

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• Resolving Combinatorial Ambiguities in Dilepton $t\bar{t}$ Event Topologies with Neural Networks
• Finding Wombling Boundaries in LHC Data with Voronoi and Delaunay Tessellations
• A singular way to search for heavy resonances in missing energy events
• Deep-Learned Event Variables for Collider Phenomenology
• Could $M_{T2}$ be a singularity variable?