Singular ways to look for the Higgs boson

by Alvaro De Rujula (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC) (ES))

Wednesday 2 May 2012, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Zurich

TH Theory Conference Room (CERN)

The discovery or exclusion of the fundamental standard scalar is a warm topic. With the current statistics at the hadron colliders, the workhorse decay channel, at all relevant H masses, is H to WW, followed by the leptonic decay of the Ws. Using phase-space singularity techniques, we construct a plethora of kinematically optimal "singularity variables" meant to facilitate the difficult tasks of separating signal and backgrounds and of measuring the mass of a putative signal. With the help of "Higgs Potatoes" (Dalitz Plots in the presence of unobservable particles), we introduce the concept of "Higgs Sieving": a multi-variable technique to separate a signal from the main backgrounds.