Vincent Hedberg
Senior lecturer
Search for exotic decays of the Higgs boson into long-lived particles in pp collisions at √s = 13 TeV using displaced vertices in the ATLAS inner detector
Author
Summary, in English
A novel search for exotic decays of the Higgs boson into pairs of long-lived neutral particles, each decaying into a bottom quark pair, is performed using 139 fb−1 of s = 13 TeV proton-proton collision data collected with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. Events consistent with the production of a Higgs boson in association with a leptonically decaying Z boson are analysed. Long-lived particle (LLP) decays are reconstructed from inner-detector tracks as displaced vertices with high mass and track multiplicity relative to Standard Model processes. The analysis selection requires the presence of at least two displaced vertices, effectively suppressing Standard Model backgrounds. The residual background contribution is estimated using a data-driven technique. No excess over Standard Model predictions is observed, and upper limits are set on the branching ratio of the Higgs boson to LLPs. Branching ratios above 10% are excluded at 95% confidence level for LLP mean proper lifetimes cτ as small as 4 mm and as large as 100 mm. For LLP masses below 40 GeV, these results represent the most stringent constraint in this lifetime regime. [Figure not available: see fulltext.] © 2021, The Author(s).
Department/s
- Particle and nuclear physics
- eSSENCE: The e-Science Collaboration
Publishing year
2021
Language
English
Publication/Series
Journal of High Energy Physics
Volume
2021
Issue
11
Document type
Journal article
Publisher
Springer
Topic
- Subatomic Physics
Keywords
- Exotics
- Hadron-Hadron scattering (experiments)
- Higgs physics
- Lifetime
- proton-proton scattering
Status
Published
ISBN/ISSN/Other
- ISSN: 1029-8479