Semileptonic decays of the standard Higgs boson

TL;DR

This paper analytically computes the fully-differential decay width of the Higgs boson into a semileptonic final state, providing a detailed method to enhance future experimental searches at colliders.

Contribution

It introduces an analytical calculation of the differential decay width for h -> l ν jj, aiding improved detection strategies for Higgs boson semileptonic decays.

Findings

Analytical expression for the fully-differential decay width.

Identification of multi-dimensional cuts to optimize signal detection.

Potential impact on Higgs search strategies at colliders.

Abstract

The Higgs boson decay into a pair of real or virtual W bosons, with one of them decaying leptonically, is predicted within the Standard Model to have the largest branching fraction of all Higgs decays that involve an isolated electron or muon, for M_h > 120 GeV. We compute analytically the fully-differential width for this h -> l \nu jj decay at tree level, and then explore some multi-dimensional cuts that preserve the region of large signal. Future searches for semileptonic decays at the Tevatron and LHC, employing fully-differential information as outlined here, may be essential for ruling out or in the Higgs boson and for characterizing a Higgs signal.