Measurement of boosted Higgs bosons produced via vector boson fusion or gluon fusion in the H $\to$ $\mathrm{b\bar{b}}$ decay mode using LHC proton-proton collision data at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV

TL;DR

This paper reports a measurement of high transverse momentum Higgs bosons decaying to bottom quark pairs, produced via vector boson fusion and gluon fusion, using CMS data at 13 TeV, employing advanced jet substructure and machine learning techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of boosted Higgs bosons in the $b\bar{b}$ decay mode with improved tagging and separation of production mechanisms at the LHC.

Findings

Measured signal strengths for VBF and gluon fusion processes.

Observed signal strength for VBF is 4.9 with uncertainties.

Observed signal strength for gluon fusion is 1.6 with uncertainties.

Abstract

A measurement is performed of Higgs bosons produced with high transverse momentum ($p_\mathrm{T}$) via vector boson or gluon fusion in proton-proton collisions. The result is based on a data set with a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV collected in 2016-2018 with the CMS detector at the LHC and corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 138 fb$^{-1}$. The decay of a high-$p_\mathrm{T}$ Higgs boson to a boosted bottom quark-antiquark pair is selected using large-radius jets and employing jet substructure and heavy-flavor taggers based on machine learning techniques. Independent regions targeting the vector boson and gluon fusion mechanisms are defined based on the topology of two quark-initiated jets with large pseudorapidity separation. The signal strengths for both processes are extracted simultaneously by performing a maximum likelihood fit to data in the large-radius jet mass distribution. The observed signal strengths relative to the standard model expectation are 4.9 $^{+1.9}_{-1.6}$ and 1.6 $^{+1.7}_{-1.5}$ for the vector boson and gluon fusion mechanisms, respectively. A differential cross section measurement is also reported in the simplified template cross section framework.