Using data from high-energy proton-proton collisions in Run 2 of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), physicists with the CMS Collaboration have released its latest search for the production of Higgs boson pairs, known as di-Higgs, and provided constraints on their production rate.
According to physicists, Higgs boson pairs can be created in two main ways.
The first is called gluon-gluon fusion, where gluons — particles inside the colliding protons — interact to produce the Higgs bosons. This process allows scientists to study the interaction between one so-called intermediate-state and two final-state Higgs bosons.
The second method involves quarks, also inside the colliding protons, that radiate two vector bosons. These vector bosons then interact to form Higgs bosons, enabling the study of interactions between two Higgs bosons and two vector bosons.
The CMS physicists performed their most recent analysis by searching for multiple ways that di-Higgs could decay.
These final states resulted from Higgs boson pairs decaying to bottom quarks, W bosons, tau leptons and photons.
By combining these searches and analyzing all the data simultaneously using sophisticated analysis techniques — including boosted decision trees and deep neural networks — the collaboration was able to extract more information than ever before.
The study allowed the researchers to establish upper limits on the rates of Higgs boson pair production with a 95% confidence level.
The measured limits are currently at 3.5 times the Standard Model expectation for the total production of di-Higgs, and 79 times the Standard Model expectation for its production by fusing vector bosons.
With the Run 3 data-taking era of the LHC in progress, the CMS experiment has already doubled the amount of data collected, and the CMS researchers are in the process of analyzing it.
One of the most interesting prospects for measuring the Higgs boson self-interaction is the upcoming High-Luminosity LHC…
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