Higgs decay to two muons at ILC

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the potential to measure the Higgs boson's decay to two muons at the ILC with improved selection and multivariate techniques, achieving a sensitivity of 2.7.

Contribution

It introduces a new muon selection method and applies multivariate analysis to enhance sensitivity in Higgs to muon decay measurement at ILC.

Findings

Sensitivity of 2.7 achieved for Higgs to muon decay

Improved muon identification increased sensitivity by over 10%

Multivariate techniques contributed an additional 10% gain

Abstract

The coupling of the Higgs to second generation particles can be studied by measuring the decay of the Higgs boson to two muons. In this analysis we considered the process at a centre of mass energy of 1 TeV, where the WW-fusion process is dominant and the Higgsstrahlung can be neglected. We assumed an integrated luminosity of 500 fb-1 and a beam polarization of (Pe- Pe+) = (-0.8,+0.2). We estimated the sensitivity of the Higgs coupling to muons using full simulation of the ILD detector described in the DBD. We developed a new selection for the two muons based on the latest available particle ID tools. This improved the sensitivity by more than 10%. A further 10% gains was achieved by exploiting multi variate techniques. Combining the two improvements we reached a sensitivity of 2.7, a significant improvement with respect to the previous estimate.