No Arabic abstract
We study the tagging of Higgs exotic decay signals using different types of deep neural networks (DNNs), focusing on the $W^pm h$ associated production channel followed by Higgs decaying into $n$ $b$-quarks with $n=4$, 6 and 8. All the Higgs decay products are collected into a fat-jet, to which we apply further selection using the DNNs. Three kinds of DNNs are considered, namely convolutional neural network (CNN), recursive neural network (RecNN) and particle flow network (PFN). The PFN can achieve the best performance because its structure allows enfolding more information in addition to the four-momentums of the jet constituents, such as particle ID and tracks parameters. Using the PFN as an example, we verify that it can serve as an efficient tagger even though it is trained on a different event topology with different $b$-multiplicity from the actual signal. The projected sensitivity to the branching ratio of Higgs decaying into $n$ $b$-quarks at the HL-LHC are 10%, 3% and 1%, for $n=4$, 6 and 8, respectively.
In extended Higgs sectors that exhibit alignment without decoupling, the additional scalars are allowed to have large couplings to the Standard Model Higgs. We show that current nonresonant di-Higgs searches can be straightforwardly adapted to look for additional Higgses in these scenarios, where pair production of non-SM Higgses can be enhanced. For concreteness, we study pair production of exotic Higgses in the context of an almost inert two Higgs doublet model, where alignment is explained through an approximate $mathbb{Z}_2$ symmetry under which the additional scalars are odd. In this context, the smallness of the $mathbb Z_2$ violating parameter suppresses single production of exotic Higgses, but it does not prevent a sizeable trilinear coupling $hHH$ between the SM Higgs ($h$) and the additional states ($H$). We study the process $pprightarrow h^* rightarrow HH$ in the final states $bbar b b bar b$, $bbar bgammagamma$, and multi-leptons. We find that at the HL-LHC these modes could be sensitive to masses of the additional neutral scalars in the range $130mbox{ GeV} lesssim m_H lesssim 290mbox{ GeV}$.
We study the Higgs boson $(h)$ decay to two light jets at the 14 TeV High-Luminosity-LHC (HL-LHC), where a light jet ($j$) represents any non-flavor tagged jet from the observational point of view. The decay mode $hto gg$ is chosen as the benchmark since it is the dominant channel in the Standard Model (SM), but the bound obtained is also applicable to the light quarks $(j=u,d,s)$. We estimate the achievable bounds on the decay branching fractions through the associated production $Vh (V=W^pm,Z)$. Events of the Higgs boson decaying into heavy (tagged) or light (un-tagged) jets are correlatively analyzed. We find that with 3000 fb$^{-1}$ data at the HL-LHC, we should expect approximately $1sigma$ statistical significance on the SM $Vh(gg)$ signal in this channel. This corresponds to a reachable upper bound ${rm BR}(hto jj) leq 4~ {rm BR}^{SM}(hto gg)$ at $95%$ confidence level. A consistency fit also leads to an upper bound ${rm BR}(hto cc) < 15~ {rm BR}^{SM}(hto cc)$ at $95%$ confidence level. The estimated bound may be further strengthened by adopting multiple variable analyses, or adding other production channels.
Axion-Like particles (ALPs) appear in various new physics models with spontaneous global symmetry breaking. When the ALP mass is in the range of MeV to GeV, the cosmology and astrophysics bounds are so far quite weak. In this work, we investigate such light ALPs through the ALP-strahlung production process pp to Va(a to {gamma}{gamma}) at the 14TeV LHC with an integrated luminosity of 3000 fb^(-1)(HL-LHC). Building on the concept of jet image which uses calorimeter towers as the pixels of the image and measures a jet as an image, we investigate the potential of machine learning techniques based on convolutional neural network (CNN) to identify the highly boosted ALPs which decay to a pair of highly collimated photons. With the CNN tagging algorithm, we demonstrate that our approach can extend current LHC sensitivity and probe the ALP mass range from 0.3GeV to 10GeV. The obtained bounds are significantly stronger than the existing limits on the ALP-photon coupling.
We investigate the possible collider signatures of a new Higgs in simple extensions of the Standard Model where baryon number is a local symmetry spontaneously broken at the low scale. We refer to this new Higgs as Baryonic Higgs. This Higgs has peculiar properties since it can decay into all Standard Model particles, the leptophobic gauge boson, and the vector-like quarks present in these theories to ensure anomaly cancellation. We investigate in detail the constraints from the $gamma gamma$, $Z gamma$, $Z Z$, and $W W$ searches at the Large Hadron Collider, needed to find a lower bound on the scale at which baryon number is spontaneously broken. The di-photon channel turns out to be a very sensitive probe in the case of small scalar mixing and can severely constrain the baryonic scale. We also study the properties of the leptophobic gauge boson in order to understand the testability of these theories at the LHC.
The prospects of observing the non-resonant di-Higgs production in the Standard Model at the proposed high energy upgrade of the LHC, $viz.$ the HE-LHC$~$($sqrt{s}=27~{rm TeV}$ and $mathcal{L} = 15~{rm ab^{-1}}$) is studied. Various di-Higgs final states are considered based on their cleanliness and signal yields. The search for the non-resonant double Higgs production at the HE-LHC is performed in the $bbar{b}gammagamma$, $bbar{b}tau^{+}tau^{-}$, $bbar{b}WW^{*}$, $WW^{*}gammagamma$, $bbar{b}ZZ^{*}$ and $bbar{b}mu^{+}mu^{-}$ channels. The signal-background discrimination is performed through multivariate analyses using the Boosted Decision Tree Decorrelated$~$(BDTD) algorithm in the$~$TMVA framework, the XGBoost toolkit and Deep Neural Network$~$(DNN). The variation in the kinematics of Higgs pair production as a function of the self-coupling of the Higgs boson, $lambda_{h}$, is also studied. The ramifications of varying $lambda_{h}$ on the $bbar{b}gammagamma$, $bbar{b}tau^{+}tau^{-}$ and $bbar{b}WW^{*}$ search analyses optimized for the SM hypothesis is also explored.