High Energy WW Scattering at the LHC with the Matrix Element Method

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that using the Matrix Element Method significantly enhances the LHC's ability to analyze WW scattering, helping distinguish Higgs properties and constrain new physics models with less than 200/fb of data.

Contribution

It introduces the application of the Matrix Element Method to WW scattering at the LHC, improving sensitivity to Higgs sector properties and new physics models.

Findings

Enhanced significance in probing the Higgs sector.

Ability to distinguish between light and heavy SM Higgs.

Constraints on Two Higgs Doublet and Strongly-Interacting Light Higgs models.

Abstract

Perhaps the most important question in particle physics today is whether the boson with mass near 125 GeV discovered at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the Higgs Boson of the Standard Model. Since a particularly important property of the Standard Model Higgs is its role in unitarizing longitudinal WW scattering, we study the ability of the LHC to probe this process in the case of same-sign W pair production. We find that the use of the Matrix Element Method increases the significance with which the Higgs sector can be probed in this channel. In particular, it allows one to distinguish between a light and heavy SM Higgs in this channel alone with a high degree of significance, as well as to set important limits in the parameter space of the Two Higgs Doublet Model and the Strongly-Interacting Light Higgs Model with less than 200/fb at the 14-TeV LHC, thus providing crucial information about the putative Higgs boson's role in electroweak symmetry breaking.