Prospects for Observing the Standard Model Higgs Boson Decaying into b\bar{b} Final States Produced in Weak Boson Fusion with an Associated Photon at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper assesses the potential to observe the Standard Model Higgs boson decaying into b-quark pairs via weak boson fusion with an associated photon at the LHC, considering detector effects and simulation uncertainties.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the observability of Higgs to bar{b} in a specific production channel, including the impact of simulation choices and detector performance.

Findings

Signal significance of 1.86 at 115 GeV Higgs mass with 100 fb^{-1} luminosity.

Monte Carlo tune significantly affects jet veto efficiency and signal detection.

The associated photon trigger enhances Higgs detection prospects.

Abstract

One of the primary goals of the Large Hadron Collider is to understand the electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism. In the Standard Model, electroweak symmetry breaking is described by the Higgs mechanism which includes a scalar Higgs boson. Electroweak measurements constrain the Standard Model Higgs boson mass to be in the 114.4 to 157 GeV/c^2 range. Within this mass window, the Higgs predominantly decays into two b-quarks. As such, we investigate the prospect of observing the Standard Model Higgs decaying to b\bar{b} produced in weak-boson-fusion with an associated central photon. An isolated, high pt, central photon trigger is expected to be available at the ATLAS and CMS experiments. In this study, we investigated the effects originating from showering, hadronization, the underlying event model, and jet performance including b-jet calibration on the sensitivity of this channel. We found that the choice of Monte Carlo and Monte Carlo tune has a large effect on the efficacy of the central jet veto and consequently the signal significance. A signal significance of about 1.86 can be achieved for m(Higgs)=115 GeV/c^2 with 100 1/fb of integrated luminosity which correspond to one year at design luminosity at 14 TeV pp collisions.