Searching for H --> tau tau in weak boson fusion at the LHC

D. Rainwater; K. Hagiwara; D. Zeppenfeld

Paper

Searching for H --> tau tau in weak boson fusion at the LHC

Abstract

Weak boson fusion is a copious source of intermediate mass Higgs bosons at the LHC. The additional very energetic forward jets in these events provide for powerful background suppression tools. We analyze the

decay mode for the Standard Model Higgs boson. A parton level analysis of the dominant physics backgrounds (mainly

and Drell-Yan production of

's) and of reducible backgrounds (from

jet and

production in association with two jets and subsequent leptonic decays) demonstrates that this channel allows the observation of

in a low background environment, yielding a significant Higgs signal with an integrated luminosity of about 30 fb

. The weak boson fusion process thus allows direct measurement of the

coupling.