English

Looking for a light Higgs boson in the overlooked channel

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2015-03-19 v2 High Energy Physics - Experiment

Abstract

The final state obtained when a Higgs boson decays to a photon and a Z boson has been mostly overlooked in current searches for a light Higgs boson. However, when the Z boson decays leptonically, all final state particles in this channel can be measured, allowing for accurate reconstructions of the Higgs mass and angular correlations. We determine the sensitivity of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) running at center of masses energies of 8 and 14 TeV to Standard Model (SM) Higgs bosons with masses in the 120 - 130 GeV range. For the 8 TeV LHC, sensitivity to several times the the SM cross section times branching ratio may be obtained with 20 inverse femtobarns of integrated luminosity, while for the 14 TeV LHC, the SM rate is probed with about 100 inverse femtobarns of integrated luminosity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1112.1405,
  title  = {Looking for a light Higgs boson in the overlooked channel},
  author = {James S. Gainer and Wai-Yee Keung and Ian Low and Pedro Schwaller},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1112.1405},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

4 pages, 4 figures. Improves on version 1 in that 8 and 14 TeV LHC running is considered, the case of a 125 GeV Higgs is treated specifically, and the effect of an additional jet in the final state has been taken into account in studying experimental sensitivity