Ascertaining the origin of the $l\nu l\nu$ excess events at the LHC by a change of beam energy

TL;DR

This paper investigates the excess of dilepton plus missing energy events at the LHC, exploring whether they originate from Higgs decay, background misestimation, or statistical fluctuation, and proposes a method to distinguish these possibilities.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach involving a change of beam energy to resolve the ambiguity of the excess events' origin.

Findings

The excess could be due to Higgs decay, background misestimation, or a fluctuation.

Changing beam energy can help identify the true source of the excess.

The method provides a new tool for analyzing LHC event anomalies.

Abstract

A higher than predicted rate of two leptons plus missing transverse energy events, reported at the summer HEP conferences, can originate from a decay of the Higgs boson into a $WW^{(*)}$ pair, a misjudgement of the rate of SM background processes or a statistical fluctuation. In this paper we discuss a way to resolve this three-fold ambiguity.