The anomalous production of multi-leptons and its impact on the measurement of Wh production at the LHC
Yesenia Hernandez, Mukesh Kumar, Alan S. Cornell, Salah-Eddine Dahbi, Yaquan Fang, Benjamin Lieberman, Bruce Mellado, Kgomotso Monnakgotla, Xifeng Ruan, Shuiting Xin
Abstract
Abstract Anomalies in multi-lepton final states at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have been reported in Refs. (von Buddenbrock et al., J Phys G 45(11):115003, arXiv:1711.07874 [hep-ph], 2018; Buddenbrock et al., JHEP 1910:157, arXiv:1901.05300 [hep-ph], 2019). These can be interpreted in terms of the production of a heavy boson, H , decaying into a standard model (SM) Higgs boson, h , and a singlet scalar, S , which is treated as a SM Higgs-like boson. This process would naturally affect the measurement of the Wh signal strength at the LHC, where h is produced in association with leptons and di-jets. Here, h would be produced with lower transverse momentum, $$p_{Th}$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>p</mml:mi> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>Th</mml:mi> </mml:mrow> </mml:msub> </mml:math> , compared to SM processes. Corners of the phase-space are fixed according to the model parameters derived in Refs. (von Buddenbrock et al., J Phys G 45(11):115003, arXiv:1711.07874 [hep-ph], 2018; von Buddenbrock et al., Eur Phys J C 76(10):580, arXiv:1606.01674 [hep-ph], 2016) without additional tuning, thus nullifying potential look-else-where effects or selection biases. Provided that no stringent requirements are made on $$p_{Th}$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>p</mml:mi> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>Th</mml:mi> </mml:mrow> </mml:msub> </mml:math> or related observables, the signal strength of Wh is $$\mu (Wh)=2.41 \pm 0.37$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>μ</mml:mi> <mml:mo>(</mml:mo> <mml:mi>W</mml:mi> <mml:mi>h</mml:mi> <mml:mo>)</mml:mo> <mml:mo>=</mml:mo> <mml:mn>2.41</mml:mn> <mml:mo>±</mml:mo> <mml:mn>0.37</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> . This corresponds to a deviation from the SM of $$3.8\sigma $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mn>3.8</mml:mn> <mml:mi>σ</mml:mi> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> . This result further strengthens the need to measure with precision the SM Higgs boson couplings in $$e^+e^-$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:msup> <mml:mi>e</mml:mi> <mml:mo>+</mml:mo> </mml:msup> <mml:msup> <mml:mi>e</mml:mi> <mml:mo>-</mml:mo> </mml:msup> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> , and $$e^-p$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:msup> <mml:mi>e</mml:mi> <mml:mo>-</mml:mo> </mml:msup> <mml:mi>p</mml:mi> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> collisions, in addition to pp collisions.