PT Journal
AU ATLAS Collaboration (Aad, Gea
   Amos, KR
   Aparisi Pozo, JA
   Bailey, AJ
   Bouchhar, N
   Cabrera Urban, S
   Cantero, J
   Cardillo, F
   Castillo Gimenez, V
   Chitishvili, M
   Costa, MJ
   Didenko
   Escobar, C
   Fiorini, L
   Fullana Torregrosa, E
   Fuster, J
   Garcia, C
   Garcia Navarro, JE
   Gomez Delegido, AJ
   Gonzalez de la Hoz, S
   Gonzalvo Rodriguez, GR
   Guerrero Rojas, JGR
   Lacasta, C
   Marti-Garcia, S
   Martinez Agullo, P
   Miralles Lopez, M
   Mitsou, VA
   Monsonis Romero, L
   Moreno Llacer, M
   Munoz Perez, D
   Navarro-Gonzalez, J
   Poveda, J
   Prades Ibañez, A
   Rubio Jimenez, A
   Ruiz-Martinez, A
   Sabatini, P
   Salt, J
   Sanchez Sebastian, V
   Sayago Galvan, I
   Senthilkumar, V
   Soldevila, U
   Sanchez, J
   Torro Pastor, E
   Valero, A
   Valiente Moreno, E
   Valls Ferrer, JA
   Varriale, L
   Villaplana Perez, M
   Vos, M
TI Evidence of off-shell Higgs boson production from ZZ leptonic decay channels and constraints on its total width with the ATLAS detector
SO Physics Letters B
JI Phys. Lett. B
PY 2023
BP 138223
EP 29pp
VL 846
DI 10.1016/j.physletb.2023.138223
LA English
AB This Letter reports on a search for off-shell production of the Higgs boson using 139 fb(-1) of pp collision data at root s = 13 TeV collected by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. The signature is a pair of Z bosons, with contributions from both the production and subsequent decay of a virtual Higgs boson and the interference of that process with other processes. The two observable final states are ZZ -> 4l and Z Z -> 2l2 nu with l = e or mu. In the ZZ -> 4l final state, a dense Neural Network is used to enhance analysis sensitivity with respect to matrix element-based discrimination. The background-only hypothesis is rejected with an observed (expected) significance of 3.3 (2.2) standard deviations, representing experimental evidence for off-shell Higgs boson production. Assuming that no new particles enter the production of the virtual Higgs boson, its total width can be deduced from the measurement of its off-shell production cross-section. The measured total width of the Higgs boson is 4.5(-2.5)(+3.3) MeV, and the observed (expected) upper limit on the total width is found to be 10.5 (10.9) MeV at 95% confidence level.
ER