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Unburied Higgs

Adam Falkowski, David Krohn, Jessie Shelton, Arun Thalapillil, Lian-Tao Wang

TL;DR

The paper tackles the challenge of discovering a Higgs that decays predominantly to light hadrons via a light uncolored resonance, $h\\to 2a\\to 4g$, which evades standard search channels. It introduces boosted-jet substructure techniques that exploit a small $m_a$, decay symmetry, and uncolored final states to identify a single fat jet containing the Higgs decay and uses discriminants such as $\\overline m$, $\\alpha$, and $\\beta$ to suppress QCD backgrounds. Through MC studies of $pp\\to hW$ and $pp\\to t\\bar t h$ at $\\sqrt{s}=14$ TeV$ with ${\\cal L}=100~{\\rm fb}^{-1}$, the approach yields $S/\\sqrt B\\gtrsim 5$ across $m_h=80$–$120$ GeV for $m_a\\sim 8$ GeV, with reasonable $S/B$ in both channels. The results demonstrate that non-standard Higgs decays can be probed with jet-substructure tools and motivate further improvements in soft-radiation handling and low-mass QCD modeling, opening a path to broader applications such as $h\\to 4b$ or $h\\to 4\\tau$.

Abstract

Many models of physics beyond the Standard Model yield exotic Higgs decays. Some of these, particularly those in which the Higgs decays to light quarks or gluons, can be very difficult to discover experimentally. Here we introduce a new set of jet substructure techniques designed to search for such a Higgs when its dominant decay is into gluons via light, uncolored resonances. We study this scenario in both V+h and tt+h production channels, and find both channels lead to discovery at the LHC with more than 5 sigma significance at 100 inverse femtobarn.

Unburied Higgs

TL;DR

The paper tackles the challenge of discovering a Higgs that decays predominantly to light hadrons via a light uncolored resonance, , which evades standard search channels. It introduces boosted-jet substructure techniques that exploit a small , decay symmetry, and uncolored final states to identify a single fat jet containing the Higgs decay and uses discriminants such as , , and to suppress QCD backgrounds. Through MC studies of and at TeV{\\cal L}=100~{\\rm fb}^{-1}S/\\sqrt B\\gtrsim 5m_h=80120m_a\\sim 8S/Bh\\to 4bh\\to 4\\tau$.

Abstract

Many models of physics beyond the Standard Model yield exotic Higgs decays. Some of these, particularly those in which the Higgs decays to light quarks or gluons, can be very difficult to discover experimentally. Here we introduce a new set of jet substructure techniques designed to search for such a Higgs when its dominant decay is into gluons via light, uncolored resonances. We study this scenario in both V+h and tt+h production channels, and find both channels lead to discovery at the LHC with more than 5 sigma significance at 100 inverse femtobarn.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 7 sections, 4 equations, 1 figure, 3 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Illustrative Model
  3. Jet Substructure Tools
  4. Analysis
  5. Discovering a buried Higgs in the $V+h$ channel
  6. Discovering a buried Higgs in the $t \bar{t}+h$ channel
  7. Conclusions

Figures (1)

  • Figure 1: Reconstructed $m_H=100~{\rm GeV}$ Higgs mass (left) in the $V+h$ channel, after the cuts of Table \ref{['tab:cuteffichv']} (excluding the cut on $m_H$); (right) in the $t\bar{t}+h$ channel, after the cuts of Table \ref{['table:tthcuts']} (excluding the cut on $m_H$). Error bars show statistical errors.