Measurement of the Higgs boson width and evidence of its off-shell contributions to ZZ production
NATURE PHYSICS, cilt.18, sa.11, ss.1329-1358, 2022 (SCI-Expanded, Scopus)
- Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
- Cilt numarası: 18 Sayı: 11
- Basım Tarihi: 2022
- Doi Numarası: 10.1038/s41567-022-01682-0
- Dergi Adı: NATURE PHYSICS
- Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Scopus, Academic Search Premier, Chemical Abstracts Core, Compendex, INSPEC
- Sayfa Sayıları: ss.1329-1358
- Açık Arşiv Koleksiyonu: AVESİS Açık Erişim Koleksiyonu
- İstanbul Üniversitesi-Cerrahpaşa Adresli: Evet
Özet
Since the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, detailed studies of its properties have been ongoing. Besides its mass, its width-related to its lifetime-is an important parameter. One way to determine this quantity is to measure its off-shell production, where the Higgs boson mass is far away from its nominal value, and relating it to its on-shell production, where the mass is close to the nominal value. Here we report evidence for such off-shell contributions to the production cross-section of two Z bosons with data from the CMS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. We constrain the total rate of the off-shell Higgs boson contribution beyond the Z boson pair production threshold, relative to its standard model expectation, to the interval [0.0061, 2.0] at the 95% confidence level. The scenario with no off-shell contribution is excluded at a p-value of 0.0003 (3.6 standard deviations). We measure the width of the Higgs boson as Gamma(H) = 3.2(-1.7)(+2.4) MeV, in agreement with the standard model expectation of 4.1 MeV. In addition, we set constraints on anomalous Higgs boson couplings to W and Z boson pairs.