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


Aad G., Abbott B., Abeling K., Abidi S., Aboulhorma A., Abramowicz H., ...Daha Fazla

PHYSICS LETTERS B, cilt.846, 2023 (SCI-Expanded) identifier identifier identifier

  • Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
  • Cilt numarası: 846
  • Basım Tarihi: 2023
  • Doi Numarası: 10.1016/j.physletb.2023.138223
  • Dergi Adı: PHYSICS LETTERS B
  • Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Scopus, Academic Search Premier, Aerospace Database, Chemical Abstracts Core, INSPEC, zbMATH, Directory of Open Access Journals
  • Ankara Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

This Letter reports on a search for off-shell production of the Higgs boson using 139 fb(-1) of pp collision data at root 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 Z Z -> 2l2 nu with l = e or mu. 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. (c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).