Since the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, detailed studies of its properties have been ongoing. Besides its mass, its width-related to its lifetime-is an important parameter. One way to determine this quantity is to measure its off-shell production, where the Higgs boson mass is far away from its nominal value, and relating it to its on-shell production, where the mass is close to the nominal value. Here we report evidence for such off-shell contributions to the production cross-section of two Z bosons with data from the CMS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. We constrain the total rate of the off-shell Higgs boson contribution beyond the Z boson pair production threshold, relative to its standard model expectation, to the interval [0.0061, 2.0] at the 95% confidence level. The scenario with no off-shell contribution is excluded at a p-value of 0.0003 (3.6 standard deviations). We measure the width of the Higgs boson as Gamma(H) = 3.2(-1.7)(+2.4) MeV, in agreement with the standard model expectation of 4.1 MeV. In addition, we set constraints on anomalous Higgs boson couplings to W and Z boson pairs.

Measurement of the Higgs boson width and evidence of its off-shell contributions to ZZ production

Aime, C.;Asenov, P.;Bianchini, L.;Bossini, E.;Ciocci, M. A.;Donato, S.;Messineo, A.;Musich, M.;Parolia, S.;Rizzi, A.;Tonelli, G.;Marini, A. C.;
2022-01-01

Abstract

Since the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, detailed studies of its properties have been ongoing. Besides its mass, its width-related to its lifetime-is an important parameter. One way to determine this quantity is to measure its off-shell production, where the Higgs boson mass is far away from its nominal value, and relating it to its on-shell production, where the mass is close to the nominal value. Here we report evidence for such off-shell contributions to the production cross-section of two Z bosons with data from the CMS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. We constrain the total rate of the off-shell Higgs boson contribution beyond the Z boson pair production threshold, relative to its standard model expectation, to the interval [0.0061, 2.0] at the 95% confidence level. The scenario with no off-shell contribution is excluded at a p-value of 0.0003 (3.6 standard deviations). We measure the width of the Higgs boson as Gamma(H) = 3.2(-1.7)(+2.4) MeV, in agreement with the standard model expectation of 4.1 MeV. In addition, we set constraints on anomalous Higgs boson couplings to W and Z boson pairs.
2022
Tumasyan, A.; Adam, W.; Andrejkovic, J. W.; Bergauer, T.; Chatterjee, S.; Damanakis, K.; Dragicevic, M.; Del Valle, A. Escalante; Fruhwirth, R.; Jeitl...espandi
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11568/1164861
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