Evidence of Higgs boson inclusive production at high transverse momentum decaying to a pair of $b$-quarks with the ATLAS detector

Abstract

This letter reports on the first evidence of Higgs-boson production at high transverse momentum in the $b\bar{b}$ final state, reconstructed in a single large-radius jet. The results are based on proton proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider at a centre-of-mass energies of 13 TeV and 13.6 TeV, corresponding to a total integrated luminosity of 301 fb${}^{-1}$. The study profits from the large background suppression provided by the use of a new transformer-based algorithm for jet identification and the sharper mass and transverse momentum, $p_{\text{T}}$, resolution from a dedicated regression model. The yield relative to the Standard Model prediction, for Higgs bosons produced at $p_{\text{T}}$ larger than 450 GeV is measured to be $1.53\pm 0.27\text{(stat.)}{}_{-0.27}^{+0.33}\text{(syst.)}\pm 0.17\text{(theo.)}$ corresponding to an observed (expected) significance of $3.8\sigma (2.5\sigma )$ relative to the background-only hypothesis. Results are also obtained in three Higgs boson $p_{\text{T}}$ intervals and found to be compatible with Standard Model predictions.

35 pages in total, author list starting page 18, 3 figures, 2 tables, published on PRL. All figures including auxiliary figures are available at https://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/PAPERS/HIGP-2024-01/