8–10 May 2017
University of Pittsburgh
US/Eastern timezone

Higgs to light jets decay at the LHC

8 May 2017, 14:45
15m
G-29 (Benedum Hall)

G-29

Benedum Hall

parallel talk Higgs

Speaker

Zhuoni Qian (University of Pittsburgh)

Description

We study the Higgs boson $(h)$ decay to two light jets at the 14 TeV High-Luminosity-LHC (HL-LHC), where a light jet ($j$) represents any non-flavor tagged jet from the observational point of view.
% On the theory side, $j$ is a gluon as expected in the Standard Model}.
The decay mode $h\to gg$ is chosen as the benchmark since it is the dominant channel in the Standard Model (SM), but the bound obtained is also applicable to the light quarks $(j=u,d,s)$. We estimate the achievable bounds on the decay branching fractions through the associated production $Vh\ (V=W^\pm,Z)$. Events of the Higgs boson decaying into heavy (tagged) or light (un-tagged) jets are correlatively analyzed.
%
We find that with 3000 fb$^{-1}$ data at the HL-LHC, we should expect approximately $1\sigma$ statistical significance on the SM $Vh(gg)$ signal in this channel. This corresponds to a reachable upper bound ${\rm BR}(h\to jj) \leq 4~ {\rm BR}^{SM}(h\to gg)$ at $95\%$ confidence level.
A consistency fit also leads to an upper bound
%
${\rm BR}(h\to cc) < 15~ {\rm BR}^{SM}(h\to cc)$ at $95\%$ confidence level.
%
The estimated bound may be further strengthened by
adopting multiple variable analyses, or adding other production channels.

Primary authors

Ms Khalida Hendricks (Ohio State University) Linda Carpenter (Ohio State University) Ning Zhou (Tsinghua University (CN)) Tao Han (University of Pittsburgh) Zhuoni Qian (University of Pittsburgh)

Presentation materials