Search for Nonresonant Pair Production of Highly Energetic Higgs Bosons Decaying to Bottom Quarks
A. Tumasyan, W. Adam, Janik Walter Andrejkovic, T. Bergauer, S. Chatterjee, K. Damanakis, M. Dragicevic, A. Escalante Del Valle, Priya Sajid Hussain, M. Jeitler, Natascha Krammer, L. Lechner, D. Liko, I. Mikulec, P. Paulitsch, F. M. Pitters, J. Schieck, R. Schöfbeck, D. Schwarz, S. Templ, W. Waltenberger, C.-E. Wulz, M. R. Darwish, X. Janssen, T. Kello, Haifa Rejeb Sfar, P. Van Mechelen, E. S. Bols, J. D’Hondt, A. De Moor, M. Delcourt, H. El Faham, S. Lowette, S. Moortgat, A. Morton, D. Müller, A. R. Sahasransu, S. Tavernier, W. Van Doninck, D. Vannerom, B. Clerbaux, G. De Lentdecker, L. Favart, D. Hohov, J. Jaramillo, K. Lee, M. Mahdavikhorrami, I. Makarenko, A. Malara, S. Paredes, L. Pétré, N. Postiau, E. Starling, Laurent Thomas, M. Vanden Bemden, C. Vander Velde, P. Vanlaer, D. Dobur, J. Knolle, Luka Lambrecht, G. Mestdach, M. Niedziela, César Rendón, C. Roskas, A. Samalan, K. Skovpen, M. Tytgat, N. Van Den Bossche, B. Vermassen, Liam Wezenbeek, A. Benecke, G. Bruno, F. Bury, C. Caputo, P. David, C. Delaere, I. S. Donertas, A. Giammanco, K. Jaffel, Sa. Jain, V. Lemaı̂tre, K. Mondal, J. Prisciandaro, A. Taliercio, T. T. Tran, P. Vischia, S. Wertz, G. A. Alves, E. Coelho, C. Hensel, A. Moraes, P. Rebello Teles, W. L. Aldá Júnior, M. Alves Gallo Pereira, M. Barroso Ferreira Filho, H. Brandao Malbouisson, W. Carvalho, J. Chinellato, E. M. Da Costa, G. G. Da Silveira
Abstract
A search for nonresonant Higgs boson (H) pair production via gluon and vector boson (V) fusion is performed in the four-bottom-quark final state, using proton-proton collision data at 13 TeV corresponding to 138 fb^{-1} collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC. The analysis targets Lorentz-boosted H pairs identified using a graph neural network. It constrains the strengths relative to the standard model of the H self-coupling and the quartic VVHH couplings, κ_{2V}, excluding κ_{2V}=0 for the first time, with a significance of 6.3 standard deviations when other H couplings are fixed to their standard model values.