Speaker
Description
Following our Higgs Pairs Workshop talk and studies in Ref. [1], we have carried out a comprehensive study of the "jet-free methodology", which performs a global analysis of all particles in an event without relying on conventional jet reconstruction. As a brief recap, Ref. [1] showed that, for the HH→4b channel, this approach achieves a >5× improvement in sensitivity, bringing observation-level sensitivity to HH production with LHC Run 2+3 data within reach. The gain stems from two key ingredients: a global analysis of all particles in an event and the remarkable scaling behavior of modern AI models when applied in this setting. In this talk, we extend the results of Ref. [1] in two directions. First, we generalize the study to all major HH decay channels to determine which channels benefit most from the jet-free approach and to evaluate their combined performance. Second, we introduce a methodology for constructing optimal discriminants targeting specific values of κλ within the jet-free paradigm. We demonstrate how this strategy can substantially strengthen constraints on κλ and discuss whether this approach could bring observation-level sensitivity to the Higgs self-coupling within reach.
[1] Yang & Li, arXiv:2508.15048