PT Journal AU ATLAS Collaboration (Aaboud, Mea Alvarez Piqueras, D Aparisi Pozo, JA Bailey, AJ Barranco Navarro, L Cabrera Urban, S Castillo, FL Castillo Gimenez, V Cerda Alberich, L Costa, MJ Escobar, C Estrada Pastor, O Ferrer, A Fiorini, L Fullana Torregrosa, E Fuster, J Garcia, C Garcia Navarro, JE Gonzalez de la Hoz, S Higon-Rodriguez, E Jimenez Pena, J Lacasta, C Lozano Bahilo, JJ Madaffari, D Mamuzic, J Marti-Garcia, S Melini, D Miñano, M Mitsou, VA Rodriguez Bosca, S Rodriguez Rodriguez, D Ruiz-Martinez, A Salt, J Santra, A Soldevila, U Sanchez, J Valero, A Valls Ferrer, JA Vos, M TI Search for the Higgs boson produced in association with a vector boson and decaying into two spin-zero particles in the H -> aa -> 4b channel in pp collisions at root s=13 TeV with the ATLAS detector SO Journal of High Energy Physics JI J. High Energy Phys. PY 2018 BP 031 EP 48pp VL 10 IS 10 DI 10.1007/JHEP10(2018)031 LA English DE Beyond Standard Model; Hadron-Hadron scattering (experiments); Higgs physics AB A search for exotic decays of the Higgs boson into a pair of spin-zero particles, H -> aa, where the a-boson decays into b-quarks promptly or with a mean proper lifetime c tau(a) up to 6 mm and has a mass in the range of 20-60GeV, is presented. The search is performed in events where the Higgs boson is produced in association with a W or Z boson, giving rise to a signature of one or two charged leptons (electrons or muons) and multiple jets from b-quark decays. The analysis is based on the dataset of proton-proton collisions at root s = 13TeV recorded in 2015 and 2016 by the ATLAS detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 36: 1 fb(-1). No significant excess of events above the Standard Model background prediction is observed, and 95% confidence-level upper limits are derived for the production cross-sections for pp -> WH, ZH and their combination, times the branching ratio of the decay chain H -> aa -> 4b. For a-bosons which decay promptly, the upper limit on the combination of cross-sections for WH and ZH times the branching ratio of H -> aa -> 4b ranges from 3.0 pb for m(a) = 20 GeV to 1.3 pb for m(a) = 60 GeV, assuming that the ratio of WH to ZH cros-ssections follows the Standard Model prediction. For a-bosons with longer proper lifetimes, the most stringent limits are 1.8 pb and 0.68 pb, respectively, at c tau(a) similar to 0.4 mm. ER