Diboson-Jets and the Search for Resonant Zh Production

TL;DR

This paper explores jet substructure techniques to identify boosted Higgs and scalar decays into W bosons, aiming to detect heavy Z' bosons at the LHC with high significance.

Contribution

It introduces novel jet substructure methods for identifying diboson-jet signatures from heavy resonance decays, enhancing search strategies at the LHC.

Findings

High significance detection of Z' bosons with masses 1.5-2.5 TeV for 125 GeV Higgs

Potential to reach 2.5-3.0 TeV for nonstandard Higgs couplings

Modes with multiple boosted Z and W bosons offer best detection prospects

Abstract

New particles at the TeV-scale may have sizeable decay rates into boosted Higgs bosons or other heavy scalars. Here, we investigate the possibility of identifying such processes when the Higgs/scalar subsequently decays into a pair of W bosons, constituting a highly distinctive "diboson-jet." These can appear as a simple dilepton (plus MET) configuration, as a two-prong jet with an embedded lepton, or as a four-prong jet. We study jet substructure methods to discriminate these objects from their dominant backgrounds. We then demonstrate the use of these techniques in the search for a heavy spin-one Z' boson, such as may arise from strong dynamics or an extended gauge sector, utilizing the decay chain Z' -> Zh -> Z(WW^(*)). We find that modes with multiple boosted hadronic Zs and Ws tend to offer the best prospects for the highest accessible masses. For 100/fb luminosity at the 14 TeV LHC, Z' decays into a standard 125 GeV Higgs can be observed with 5-sigma significance for masses of 1.5-2.5 TeV for a range of models. For a 200 GeV Higgs (requiring nonstandard couplings, such as fermiophobic), the reach may improve to up to 2.5-3.0 TeV.