Reconstruction and Selection of Single Top + Higgs to $\mathrm{b}\overline{\mathrm{b}}$ events at CMS in pp Collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV

TL;DR

This paper presents a method for reconstructing and selecting single top plus Higgs to bb events at the CMS experiment, aiming to improve understanding of the top quark Yukawa coupling at 13 TeV proton-proton collisions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel event reconstruction and selection strategy using boosted decision trees to distinguish signal from background in single top plus Higgs production.

Findings

Effective jet assignment with boosted decision trees

Enhanced separation between signal and t-tbar background

Reconstruction techniques improve analysis sensitivity

Abstract

The associated production of a single top quark together with a Higgs boson at the LHC can be used to lift the degeneracy regarding the sign of the top quark Yukawa coupling. Therefore, t-channel and tW-channel production where the Higgs boson is decaying into a $\mathrm{b}\overline{\mathrm{b}}$ pair is inspected. Boosted decision trees are used to assign jets to the quarks in the final state and classify the events. To maximize the separation between the signal and the dominating $\mathrm{t}\overline{\mathrm{t}}$ background each event is reconstructed under a signal and a $\mathrm{t}\overline{\mathrm{t}}$ hypothesis. The poster focuses on the event selection and the reconstruction of events.