Search for flavor-changing neutral current interactions of the top quark and the Higgs boson decaying to a bottom quark-antiquark pair at root s=13 TeV

Tumasyan, A. and Adam, W. and Andrejkovic, J. W. and Bergauer, T. and Chatterjee, S. and Csanád, Máté and Farkas, Krisztián and Gadallah, Mahmoud Moussa Abdelkhalek and Lökös, Sándor and Major, Péter and Mandal, Koushik and Mehta, Ankita and Pásztor, Gabriella and Surányi, Olivér and Veres, Gábor and Raics, Péter and Trócsányi, Zoltán and Ujvári, Balázs and Csörgő, Tamás and Nemes, Frigyes and Novák, Tamás (2022) Search for flavor-changing neutral current interactions of the top quark and the Higgs boson decaying to a bottom quark-antiquark pair at root s=13 TeV. JOURNAL OF HIGH ENERGY PHYSICS, 2022 (2). ISSN 1126-6708

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Abstract

A search for flavor-changing neutral current interactions of the top quark (t) and the Higgs boson (H) is presented. The search is based on a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 137 fb(-1) recorded by the CMS experiment at the LHC in proton-proton collisions at root s = 13TeV. Events containing exactly one lepton (muon or electron) and at least three jets, among which at least two are identified as originating from the hadronization of a bottom quark, are analyzed. A set of deep neural networks is used for kinematic event reconstruction, while boosted decision trees distinguish the signal from the background events. No significant excess over the background predictions is observed, and upper limits on the signal production cross sections are extracted. These limits are interpreted in terms of top quark decay branching fractions (B) to the Higgs boson and an up (u) or a charm quark (c). Assuming one nonvanishing extra coupling at a time, the observed (expected) upper limits at 95% confidence level are B(t -> Hu) < 0.079 (0.11)% and B(t -> Hc) < 0.094 (0.086)%.

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