Search for a boosted Higgs boson decaying to bottom quark pairs in association with a W or Z boson in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV

TL;DR

This paper reports a search for high transverse momentum Higgs bosons decaying to bottom quark pairs, produced alongside W or Z bosons, using CMS data at 13 TeV, employing advanced neural network techniques for jet identification.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of boosted Higgs decays with deep learning-based jet tagging in proton-proton collisions at 13 TeV.

Findings

Observed signal strength is consistent with the standard model within uncertainties.

Utilized large-radius jets and graph convolutional neural networks for heavy-flavor tagging.

Analyzed 138 fb$^{-1}$ of CMS data from 2016-2018.

Abstract

A search is conducted for standard model Higgs bosons with large transverse momentum ($p_\mathrm{T}$) decaying to bottom quark pairs and produced in association with a hadronically decaying W or Z boson at the LHC. The result is based on a dataset of proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV collected with the CMS detector in 2016$-$2018, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 138 fb$^{-1}$. Boosted Higgs, W, and Z boson decays are reconstructed using large-radius jets with $p_\mathrm{T}$ $\gt$ 450 GeV and identified with heavy-flavor classifiers based on a graph convolutional neural network. The observed signal strength relative to the standard model expectation is $\mu$ = 0.7$2^{+0.75}_{-0.71}$ including statistical and systematic uncertainties.