Accumulating Evidence for the Associate Production of a Neutral Scalar with Mass around 151 GeV


Abstract in English

In recent years, hints for multi-lepton anomalies have been accumulated by the analysis of Large Hadron Collider (LHC) data, pointing towards the existence of beyond the Standard Model (SM) Higgs bosons: a new scalar particle $S$ with a mass $m_S$ in the range between $130,$GeV and $160,$GeV, produced from the decay of a heavier new scalar particle, $H$. Motivated by this observation, we perform a search for the signatures of $S$ within this mass region, which has been studied by CMS and ATLAS as a by-product of the SM Higgs searches in the side-bands of the kinematic regions. Combining the $gammagamma$ and $Zgamma$ channels, with associated leptons, di-jets, bottom quarks and missing energy, we obtain a local (global) significance of 5.1$sigma$ (4.8$sigma$) for a mass of $m_S= 151.5$,GeV and provide the preferred ranges for the corresponding (fiducial) cross sections. This is a strong indication for a scalar resonance $S$ decaying into photons, and, to a lesser extent to $Zgamma$, in association with missing energy, jets or leptons. Hints for the decays into, or production in association with, bottom quarks are statistically less significant. In order to test this hypothesis, we propose a search for $Hrightarrow gammagamma boverline{b},tau^+tau^- boverline{b}$ in asymmetric configurations that has not yet been performed by ATLAS and CMS.

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