The discovery of the Higgs boson, with mass known to better than the percent level, enables for the first time precision Higgs boson analyses. Toward this goal, we define an expansion formalism of the Higgs boson partial widths and branching fraction
s that facilitates such studies. This expansion yields the observables as a perturbative expansion around reference values of Standard Model input observables (quark masses, QCD coupling constant, etc.). We compute the coefficients of the expansion using state-of-the-art results. We also study the various sources of uncertainties in computing the partial widths and branching fractions more precisely. We discuss the impact of these results with efforts to discern new physics through precision Higgs boson studies.
We show that in the Standard Model the parametrically leading (by a factor 1/alpha_s) contribution to the inclusive CP asymmetry in B->X_{s,d}+gamma decays arises from a long-distance effect in the interference of the electromagnetic dipole amplitude
with the amplitude for an up-quark penguin transition accompanied by soft gluon emission. This contribution is governed by a single hadronic parameter Lambda_{17}^u related to a matrix elements of a non-local operator. In view of current experimental data, a future precision measurement of the flavor-averaged CP asymmetry in B->X_s+gamma will signal the presence of new physics only if a value below -2% is found. A cleaner probe of new physics is offered by the difference of the CP asymmetries in charged versus neutral B-meson decays.
We introduce a new class of infrared safe jet observables, which we refer to as template overlaps, designed to filter targeted highly boosted particle decays from QCD jets and other background. Template overlaps are functional measures that quantify
how well the energy flow of a physical jet matches the flow of a boosted partonic decay. Any region of the partonic phase space for the boosted decays defines a template. We will refer to the maximum functional overlap found this way as the template overlap. To illustrate the method, we test lowest-order templates designed to distinguish highly-boosted top and Higgs decays from backgrounds produced by event generators. For the functional overlap, we find good results with a simple construction based on a Gaussian in energy differences within angular regions surrounding the template partons. Although different event generators give different averages for our template overlaps, we find in each case excellent rejection power, especially when combined with cuts based on jet shapes. The template overlaps are capable of systematic improvement by including higher order corrections in the template phase space.
