Discovering the Higgs Boson in New Physics Events using Jet Substructure

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new jet substructure technique to discover the Higgs boson in new physics events at the LHC, especially when produced with other new physics particles, enabling earlier detection than traditional methods.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel jet substructure method tailored for identifying the Higgs boson in new physics scenarios, demonstrated within the minimal supersymmetric standard model.

Findings

Successfully identifies the lightest Higgs in MSSM with boosted jets

Enables potential early discovery before conventional searches

Applicable to a broad class of new physics models

Abstract

We present a novel method to discover the Higgs boson in new physics event samples at the LHC. Our technique applies to broad classes of models where the Higgs has a significant branching fraction to b-bbar. We exploit the recently developed techniques for discovering a boosted Higgs using jet substructure. Our requirements of new physics are quite general: there must be features in the new physics event sample that allow a clean separation from standard model background, and there should be Higgs bosons produced in association with the new physics. We demonstrate that this method superbly finds and identifies the lightest Higgs boson in the minimal supersymmetric standard model. We focus on two case studies with a gravitino LSP, however, generalizations to other LSPs and to other models of new physics are also briefly discussed. In some circumstances, discovery of the lightest Higgs is possible well before conventional search strategies uncover convincing evidence.