The European Physical Journal C > 2016 > 76 > 11 > 1-31
Search for the Higgs boson produced in association with a W boson and decaying to four b-quarks via two spin-zero particles in pp collisions at 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector
Source
Abstract
This paper presents a dedicated search for exotic decays of the Higgs boson to a pair of new spin-zero particles, $$H \rightarrow aa$$ H → a a , where the particle a decays to b-quarks and has a mass in the range of 20–60 GeV. The search is performed in events where the Higgs boson is produced in association with a $$W$$ W boson, giving rise to a signature of a lepton (electron or muon), missing transverse momentum, and multiple jets from b-quark decays. The analysis is based on the full dataset of pp collisions at $$\sqrt{s} = 13\,\mathrm{{TeV}}$$ s = 13 TeV recorded in 2015 by the ATLAS detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 3.2 $$\text{ fb }^{-1}$$ fb - 1 . No significant excess of events above the Standard Model prediction is observed, and a $$95\,\%$$ 95 % confidence-level upper limit is derived for the product of the production cross section for $$pp \rightarrow WH$$ p p → W H times the branching ratio for the decay $$H \rightarrow aa \rightarrow 4b$$ H → a a → 4 b . The upper limit ranges from 6.2 pb for an a-boson mass $$m_a = 20\,\mathrm{{GeV}}$$ m a = 20 GeV to 1.5 pb for $$m_a = 60\,\mathrm{{GeV}}$$ m a = 60 GeV .
Identifiers
journal ISSN : | 1434-6044 |
journal e-ISSN : | 1434-6052 |
DOI | 10.1140/epjc/s10052-016-4418-9 |