2006/06/30 by Zack Sullivan, Edmond L. Berger · 16 citations
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Boson #Computational Physics and Python Applications #Electron #Fermilab #Higgs boson #Large Hadron Collider #Lepton #Missing energy #Nuclear physics #Particle Detector Development and Performance #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #Supersymmetry #Tevatron #hep-ex #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.74.033008
published in Physical review. D. Particles, fields, gravitation, and cosmology/Physical review. D. Particles and fields 74(3) (American Physical Society) · 23 pgs., 10 figs, revtex4, 1 Ref. added, minor typos corrected, to appear in Phys. Rev. D
arxiv created 2006/08/04 · openalex publication_date 2006/08/10 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We investigate characteristics of the signal and backgrounds for Higgs boson decay into WW at the Fermilab Tevatron and CERN Large Hadron Collider. In the lepton-pair-plus-missing-energy final state, we show that the background receives an important contribution from semileptonic decays of heavy flavors. Lepton isolation cuts provide too little suppression of these heavy flavor contributions, and an additional 4 to 8 orders-of-magnitude suppression must come from physics cuts. We demonstrate that an increase of the minimum transverse momentum of nonleading leptons in multilepton events is one effective way to achieve the needed suppression, without appreciable loss of the Higgs boson signal. Such a cut would impact the efficiency of searches for supersymmetry as well. We emphasize the importance of direct measurement of the lepton background from heavy flavor production.