Constraining the Higgs boson width with ZZ production at the LHC

By F. Caola, K. Melnikov. 2013

261 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We point out that existing measurements of $pp \to ZZ$ cross-section at the LHC in a broad range of ZZ invariant masses allow one to derive a model-independent upper bound on the Higgs boson width, thanks to strongly enhanced off-shell Higgs contribution. Using CMS data and considering events in the interval of ZZ invariant masses from 100 to 800 GeV, we find $\Gamma_H \le 38.8 \times \Gamma_H^{SM} \approx 163$ MeV, at the $95\%$ confidence level. Restricting ZZ invariant masses to $M_{ZZ} \ge 300$ GeV range, we estimate that this bound can be improved to $\Gamma_H \le 21 \times \Gamma_H^{SM} \approx 88$ MeV. Under the assumption that all couplings of the Higgs boson to Standard Model particles scale in a universal way, our result can be translated into an upper limit on the branching fraction of the Higgs boson decay to invisible final states. We obtain $Br(H \to inv) < 0.84 (0.78)$, depending on the range of ZZ invariant masses that are used to constrain the width. We believe that an analysis along these lines should be performed by experimental collaborations in the near future and also in the run II of the LHC. We estimate that such analyses can, eventually, be sensitive to the Higgs boson width as small as $\Gamma_H \sim 10 \times \Gamma_H^{SM}$.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/38ffc59d18e656021eabd8a5cbfd53255cf01fa4

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Citations in the corpus

Measurements of the Higgs boson production and decay rates and coupling strengths using pp collision data at \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\o (2015, unknown): “The signal-strength measurements of offshell Higgs boson production [21], on the other hand, is assumed to only depend on the coupling-strength scale factors and not on the total width [103,104], i.”
Physics at a 100 TeV pp collider: Higgs and EW symmetry breaking studies (2016, background): “It has been pointed out that off-shell Higgs measurements can set an indirect limit on the total Higgs width [376], which could in turn result in a limit on Higgs decays into dark matter candidates, however such an interpretation is highly model-dependent [377] and can only be invoked on a case-byca”
ILC Higgs White Paper (2013, background): “More sensitive constraints on the total width than the ones limited by the experimental mass resolution can be expected from the analysis of interference effects between signal an background [196, 197, 198, 199, 200].”
Constraints on the spin-parity and anomalous HVV couplings of the Higgs boson in proton collisions at 7 and 8 TeV (2015, background): “However, this off-shell contribution depends on the width of the Higgs boson [73].”
Bounding the Higgs width at the LHC using full analytic results for gg → e−e+μ−μ+ (2013, methodology): “[8] were obtained using the code gg2VV [9].”
Mass effects in the Higgs-gluon coupling: boosted vs. off-shell production (2014, methodology): “As mentioned it was recently proposed to use information from the off-shell regime as a direct measurement of the Higgs width [53–57].”
Combined measurements of Higgs boson production and decay using up to $80$ fb$^{-1}$ of proton-proton collision data at $\sqrt{s}=$ 13 TeV collected with the ATLAS experiment (2019, unknown): “[134,135], σoffði → H → fÞ ∼ κ(2)i;off × κ(2)f;off .”
Higgs Boson studies at future particle colliders (2019, background): “The ratio of the off-shell over the on-shell rate is directly proportional to the total width [101].”
Higgs Physics at the HL-LHC and HE-LHC (2019, methodology): “Another option to constrain the width is off-shell methods [487, 488, 489, 490], which are based on the following observation.”
Soft gluon resummation in the signal-background interference process of gg(→ h∗) → ZZ (2015, background): “We also find that the approximate K-factors in the interference and the pure signal processes are the same, which is in agreement with the statements in previous literatures [3, 24].”
Probing the Standard Model with Higgs signal rates from the Tevatron, the LHC and a future ILC (2014, methodology): “40 × ΓSM H using current data, and a potential future sensitivity of ∼ 10 × ΓSM H is claimed for increased integrated luminosity [29, 32].”
Dark Matter through the Higgs portal (2019, background): “However, rather recently, it was noticed [211,212] that in the production channel pp→ V V → 4f with V =W,Z, a large fraction of the Higgs–mediated cross section lies in the high–mass tail where the invariant mass of the V V system is larger than 2MV .”