A Search for Exotic Higgs Decays in the 4b Final State

Morrison, Kaitlyn

Student Work

A Search for Exotic Higgs Decays in the 4b Final State

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The search for exotic Higgs decay has been an active area of research since the discovery of a Higgs Boson in 2012 at the ATLAS and CMS detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. These searches use the large number of Higgs Bosons produced in the LHC to investigate beyond the Standard Model physics. Naturally, this is a major area of research and various theories have been proposed and are being investigated. This project focuses on the possibility of a new particle (represented by “a” here), which would be similar to the Higgs Boson particle and would be produced in the decay of the Higgs boson found in 2012. The Higgs would then decay into two a bosons that would subsequently decay into four b quarks (H→aa→bbb ̅b ̅). Searching for this decay in the events recorded by the ATLAS detector is a difficult process as this decay is expected to be very rare, while the production of four b quarks is very common. The goals of this project include understanding the kinematics behind signal and background events (ie. Collisions that produce four b quarks but do not come from an exotic Higgs decay), creating a Binary Decision Tree (BDT) to classify events, and analyzing the effectiveness of the BDT to separate the signal from background. This work aims to provide a well-established algorithm that can be run over the Run 2 data of the LHC to determine if these signal events exist.

This report represents the work of one or more WPI undergraduate students submitted to the faculty as evidence of completion of a degree requirement. WPI routinely publishes these reports on its website without editorial or peer review.

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