Measurement of Higgs boson production at high momentum in the VH, H → bb̄ channel with the ATLAS detector
With the rapidly increasing proton-proton collision data-set provided by the LHC, the ATLAS experiment gains access to Higgs bosons produced with ever higher momenta. Measurements in this phase space are well motivated by a vast variety of BSM models which predict effects that scale with the square of the involved energy scale.
These studies require, however, a change of paradigm in terms of the involved Higgs boson candidate reconstruction: new techniques that are able to cope with the collimated decay products from such boosted Higgs bosons are needed.
In this talk, I will present a novel measurement of Higgs bosons being produced in association with a heavy vector boson and decaying into a pair of b-quarks. The results are based on the full data-set collected by the ATLAS experiment in Run 2 of the LHC at nearly twice the initial collision energy. I will motivate the analysis’ necessity within the broader particle physics landscape, and explain the main experimental difficulties that had to be overcome to provide the first fiducial cross-section measurements at vector-boson transverse momenta > 400 GeV.
Steven Lowette and Ioana Maris