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Oxana Smirnova

Oxana Smirnova

Senior Lecturer, Deputy Head of division

Oxana Smirnova

Evidence of off-shell Higgs boson production from ZZ leptonic decay channels and constraints on its total width with the ATLAS detector

Author

  • G. Aad
  • T.P.A. Åkesson
  • C. Doglioni
  • P.A. Ekman
  • V. Hedberg
  • H. Herde
  • B. Konya
  • E. Lytken
  • R. Poettgen
  • N.D. Simpson
  • E. Skorda
  • O. Smirnova
  • L. Zwalinski

Summary, in English

This Letter reports on a search for off-shell production of the Higgs boson using 139 fb−1 of pp collision data at s= 13 TeV collected by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. The signature is a pair of Z bosons, with contributions from both the production and subsequent decay of a virtual Higgs boson and the interference of that process with other processes. The two observable final states are ZZ→4ℓ and ZZ→2ℓ2ν with ℓ=e or μ. In the ZZ→4ℓ final state, a dense Neural Network is used to enhance analysis sensitivity with respect to matrix element-based discrimination. The background-only hypothesis is rejected with an observed (expected) significance of 3.3 (2.2) standard deviations, representing experimental evidence for off-shell Higgs boson production. Assuming that no new particles enter the production of the virtual Higgs boson, its total width can be deduced from the measurement of its off-shell production cross-section. The measured total width of the Higgs boson is 4.5−2.5+3.3 MeV, and the observed (expected) upper limit on the total width is found to be 10.5 (10.9) MeV at 95% confidence level. © 2023 The Author(s)

Department/s

  • Particle and nuclear physics
  • eSSENCE: The e-Science Collaboration

Publishing year

2023

Language

English

Publication/Series

Physics Letters, Section B: Nuclear, Elementary Particle and High-Energy Physics

Volume

846

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Elsevier

Topic

  • Subatomic Physics

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 0370-2693