Re-evaluating Jet Reconstruction Techniques for New Higgs Boson Searches

TL;DR

This study evaluates various jet reconstruction techniques to optimize the detection of Higgs boson decay signatures in fully hadronic final states, crucial for searches beyond the Standard Model.

Contribution

It systematically compares jet clustering methods and identifies optimal configurations for reconstructing Higgs bosons in complex decay chains.

Findings

Jet reconstruction effectiveness varies with algorithm settings.

Optimal parameters improve Higgs mass reconstruction accuracy.

Methodology aids in designing BSM Higgs search strategies.

Abstract

The ultimate motivation of our study is to look for signs of physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM). We investigate whether different jet clustering techniques might be more or less suited to the particular final states of interest. In particular, we are interested in fully hadronic final states emerging from the decay chain of the Standard Model like Higgs boson into pairs of light Higgs states, the latter in turn decaying into bottom-anti bottom pairs. We show that, the ability of selecting the multi-jet final state and to reconstruct invariant masses of the Higgs bosons from it depend strongly on the choice of acceptance cuts, resolution parameters and reconstruction algorithm as well as its settings. Hence, we indicate the optimal choice of the latter for the purpose of establishing such a benchmark as a BSM signal. We then repeat the exercise for a heavy Higgs boson cascading into two SM-like Higgs states, obtaining similar results.