This thesis reports measurements of the Higgs boson production in proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV with data collected by the CMS experiment during the Run 2 operation period (2016-2018) of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The measurement is performed using a sample of event candidates to originate from the decay of a Higgs boson into a pair of W bosons, which then decay into a charged lepton and a neutrino resulting in a nal state with two charged leptons of dierent avour. The thesis focuses on the study of the Higgs boson production through the gluon fusion process, which is the most favoured one at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV...
This thesis describes the stand-alone discovery and measurement of the Higgs boson in its decays to two W bosons using the Run-I ATLAS dataset. This is the most precise measurement of gluon-fusion Higgs boson production and is among the most significant results attained at the LHC. The thesis provides an exceptionally clear exposition on a complicated analysis performed by a large team of researchers. Aspects of the analysis performed by the author are explained in detail; these include new methods for evaluating uncertainties on the jet binning used in the analysis and for estimating the background due to associated production of a W boson and an off-shell photon. The thesis also describes a measurement of the WW cross section, an essential background to Higgs boson production. The primary motivation of the LHC was to prove or disprove the existence of the Higgs boson. In 2012, CERN announced this discovery and the resultant ATLAS publication contained three decay channels: gg, ZZ, and WW.
Abstract: On the 4 th of July 2012 the observation of a new neutral particle was announced by the ATLAS [1] and CMS [2] Collaborations. This particle is by now generally considered as the Higgs boson H predicted [3, 4] in the Standard Model of particle physics. Its mass of m H = 125.09 ± 0.24 GeV [5] implies a rich set of final states which allow for experimental studies in regards to this particle and searches for deviations from the properties predicted by the Standard Model. In this thesis a measurement of the gluon-fusion and vector-boson fusion production cross sections times H→WW* branching ratio is presented using final states with one electron and one muon. The measurement is based on proton- proton collisions with an integrated luminosity of 36.1 fb -1 √ recorded with the ATLAS detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider ( LHC ) at s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. Signal-like events are selected in categories with different jet multiplicities. The results are extracted by means of a binned maximum-likelihood fit. To this end, either distributions in multiple discriminant variables or the response of a multivariate classifier are used depending on the category. The results are found to be well compatible with the Standard Model predictions. This analysis is extrapolated to estimate the future precision of such a measurement at the end of the High-Luminosity LHC programme [6]. This extrapolated analysis is combined with analogously extrapolated analyses targeting other production and decay modes of the Higgs boson. Based on this combination the expected precision is determined for future measurements of couplings between the Higgs boson and other particles. Thereby an estimation is given for the anticipated sensitivity of these analyses to signs of physics beyond the Standard Model. In addition studies are presented to identify sources of electron charge misidentification in the reconstruction algorithms employed in the ATLAS Collaboration.
This thesis presents the measurement of the Higgs boson cross section in the diphoton decay channel. The measurement relies on proton-proton collision data at a center-of-mass energy √s = 13 TeV recorded by the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The collected data correspond to the full Run-2 dataset with an integrated luminosity of 139 fb-1. The measured cross sections are used to constrain anomalous Higgs boson interactions in the Effective Field Theory (EFT) framework. The results presented in this thesis represent a reduction by a factor 2 of the different photon and jet energy scale and resolution systematic uncertainties with respect to the previous ATLAS publication. The thesis details the calibration of electron and photon energies in ATLAS, in particular the measurement of the presampler energy scale and the estimation of its systematic uncertainty. This calibration was used to perform a measurement of the Higgs boson mass in the H → γγ and H → 4l channels using the 36 fb−1 dataset.
This thesis describes the stand-alone discovery and measurement of the Higgs boson in its decays to two W bosons using the Run-I ATLAS dataset. This is the most precise measurement of gluon-fusion Higgs boson production, and is among the most significant results attained at the LHC. The thesis provides an exceptionally clear exposition on a complicated analysis performed by a large team of researchers. Aspects of the analysis performed by the author are explained in detail; these include new methods for evaluating uncertainties on the jet binning used in the analysis, and for estimating the background due to associated production of a W boson and an off-shell photon. The thesis also describes a measurement of the WW cross section, an essential background to Higgs boson production. The primary motivation of the LHC was to prove or disprove the existence of the Higgs boson. In 2012, CERN announced this discovery and the resultant ATLAS publication contained three decay channels: gg, ZZ, and WW.
In 2012, the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider announced they had each observed a new particle with a mass of about 125 GeV/c^2. Given the available data, the properties of this particle are consistent with the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics (SM). The Higgs boson, as proposed within the SM, is the simplest manifestation of the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism. This discovery was driven by the gluon fusion (ggF) production mode, the dominant Higgs boson production mechanism at the LHC. The SM also predicts that the Higgs boson can be produced by the fusion of two weak vector bosons (VBF). Measuring VBF Higgs boson production is an important test of the SM but it is challenging to measure given its cross section is an order of magnitude smaller than that of ggF. After H->bb, H->WW* is the dominant decay channel for the SM Higgs boson at 125 GeV/c^2 and is therefore a promising channel to measure its properties. In addition, the VBF H->WW* search channel makes it possible to probe the exclusive coupling of the Higgs boson to the weak vector bosons. Precise measurements of these coupling strengths make it possible to constrain new models of physics beyond the SM. Despite its relatively large branching ratio, H->WW*->lnln is a challenging channel to search for the Higgs boson because of the neutrinos in the final state which are not directly detectable by the ATLAS detector. Consequently, it is not possible to fully reconstruct the mass of the WW system. Furthermore, there are several backgrounds that have the same signature in the detector as the signal. Top quark pair production is the largest background in this analysis. A multivariate analysis technique, based on an eight-variable boosted decision tree (BDT), is used to search for VBF H->WW*->lnln in the Run-I data and a subset of the Run-II data. This analysis provides the first evidence for VBF H->WW*->lnln with a significance of 3.2 standard deviations in Run-I and 1.9 standard deviations in Run-II. The measured signal strength relative to the rate predicted by the SM for VBF H->WW*->lnln is 1.3 +/- 0.5 using the Run-I data, and 1.7 +1.1/-0.9 using a fraction of the Run-II data.
The work presented in this PhD dissertation is the first search at CMS for Higgs bosons produced in association with top quarks (ttH) in a final state consisting of only jets. The results presented in this book uncover a new class of ttH events that will help us elucidate our understanding of the Yukawa sector interactions between the Higgs boson and the top quark. Despite this being the most common decay signature for ttH, a large contamination of SM backgrounds makes it the most challenging for extracting a signal from data. The PhD thesis presents many sophisticated tools and techniques that were developed in order to overcome these challenges. These tools pave the way for future analyses to investigate other standard model and beyond-standard model physics.
This book describes the searches that lead to the discovery of a Higgs boson performed at CMS, one of the two main experiments at the CERN LHC. After an overview of the theory and of the CMS experiment, all search channels are described, with emphasis on the ones with the best sensitivity. The statistical methodology used to analyse and the outcomes of the searches and the discovery results are then presented in detail.
