A Study of the Branching Ratio of H ->cc_bar at a Future e+e- Linear Collider

TL;DR

This study assesses the feasibility of measuring the Higgs boson's decay into charm quarks at a future electron-positron linear collider, using advanced vertex reconstruction and neural network techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a method combining topological vertex reconstruction and neural networks to estimate the Higgs to charm quark branching ratio at future colliders.

Findings

Estimated statistical error of 20.1% with optimal detector layers.

Error increases to 25.7% with fewer detector layers.

Feasibility of measuring Br(H -> cc_bar) at 250 GeV with 500 fb^-1.

Abstract

We carried out a feasibility study on the measurement of the branching ratio of H -> cc_bar at a future e+e- linear collider. We used the topological vertex reconstructing algorithm for accumulating secondary vertex information and the neural network for optimizing c quark selection. With an assumption of a light Higgs mass of 120 GeV/c^2, we estimated the statistical error of Br(H -> cc_bar) to be 20.1% or 25.7% depending on the number of vertex detector layers at the center-of-mass energy of 250 GeV and the intergrated luminosity of 500 fb^-1.