Jet Vetoes Interfering with H->WW

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how jet vetoes impact the measurement of off-shell Higgs production in $H ightarrow WW$ decays, revealing significant effects on cross sections and distributions crucial for Higgs property studies.

Contribution

It provides an analytical framework using soft collinear effective theory to quantify jet veto effects on off-shell Higgs processes, including signal-background interference.

Findings

Jet vetoes cause a strong dependence on partonic center of mass energy.

Jet vetoes modify distributions in $ oot s$ and $M_T$.

The effects are demonstrated at next-to-leading log order for $gg ightarrow H ightarrow WW$.

Abstract

Far off-shell Higgs production in $H \rightarrow WW,ZZ$, is a particularly powerful probe of Higgs properties, allowing one to disentangle Higgs width and coupling information unavailable in on-shell rate measurements. These measurements require an understanding of the cross section in the far off-shell region in the presence of realistic experimental cuts. We analytically study the effect of a $p_T$ jet veto on far off-shell cross sections, including signal-background interference, by utilizing hard functions in the soft collinear effective theory that are differential in the decay products of the $W/Z$. Summing large logarithms of $\sqrt{\hat s}/p_T^{veto}$, we find that the jet veto induces a strong dependence on the partonic centre of mass energy, $\sqrt{\hat s}$, and modifies distributions in $\sqrt{\hat s}$ or $M_T$. The example of $gg\rightarrow H \rightarrow WW$ is used to demonstrate these effects at next to leading log order. We also discuss the importance of jet vetoes and jet binning for the recent program to extract Higgs couplings and widths from far off-shell cross sections.