Search for the Higgs boson produced in association with a W boson and decaying to four b-quarks via two spin-zero particles in pp collisions at 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector

Aaboud, M. and Aad, G. and Abbott, B. and Abdallah, J. and Abdinov, O. and Krasznahorkay, Attila and Pásztor, Gabriella and Tóth, József (2016) Search for the Higgs boson produced in association with a W boson and decaying to four b-quarks via two spin-zero particles in pp collisions at 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector. EUROPEAN PHYSICAL JOURNAL C, 76 (11). ISSN 1434-6044

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Abstract

This paper presents a dedicated search for exotic decays of the Higgs boson to a pair of new spin-zero particles, H → aa, where the particle a decays to b-quarks and has a mass in the range of 20–60 GeV. The search is performed in events where the Higgs boson is produced in association with a W boson, giving rise to a signature of a lepton (elec- tron or muon), missing transverse momentum, and multiple jets from b-quark decays. The analysis is based on the full dataset of pp colli- sions at √s = 13 TeV recorded in 2015 by the ATLAS detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, corresponding to an integrated lumin- osity of 3.2 fb−1. No significant excess of events above the Standard Model prediction is observed, and a 95% confidence-level upper limit is derived for the product of the production cross section for pp → WH times the branching ratio for the decay H → aa → 4b. The upper limit ranges from 6.2 pb for an a-boson mass ma = 20 GeV to 1.5 pb for ma = 60 GeV.

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