Discovering Higgs Decays to Lepton Jets at Hadron Colliders

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel search strategy for Higgs bosons decaying into lepton jets at hadron colliders, utilizing electromagnetic and charge ratio cuts to distinguish signal from QCD backgrounds, and estimates the potential mass reach at Tevatron and LHC.

Contribution

It introduces a new method to detect Higgs decays into lepton jets using specific jet properties and provides estimated mass reach limits for current colliders.

Findings

QCD rejection efficiencies of about 10^-3 per jet.

Higgs mass reach of 155 GeV at Tevatron with 10 fb^-1.

Higgs mass reach of 135 GeV at 7 TeV LHC with 1 fb^-1.

Abstract

The Higgs boson may decay predominantly into a hidden sector, producing lepton jets instead of the standard Higgs signatures. We propose a search strategy for such a signal at hadron colliders. A promising channel is the associated production of the Higgs with a Z or W, where the dominant background is Z or W plus QCD jets. The lepton jets can be discriminated from QCD jets by cutting on the electromagnetic fraction and charge ratio. The former is the fraction of jet energy deposited in the electromagnetic calorimeter and the latter is the ratio of energy carried by charged particles to the electromagnetic energy. We use a Monte Carlo description of detector response to estimate QCD rejection efficiencies of order 10^-3 per jet. The expected Higgs mass reach is about 155 GeV at the Tevatron with 10 fb^-1 of data and about 135 GeV at the 7 TeV LHC with 1 fb^-1.