Measuring the Higgs boson mass with transverse mass variables

Abstract

We provide a comparative study of the Higgs boson mass measurements based on two approaches to the dileptonic decay of W bosons produced by the Higgs boson decay, one using the kinematic variable M_T^true and the other using the M_T2-assisted on-shell reconstruction of the invisible neutrino momenta. We find that these two approaches can determine the Higgs boson mass with a similar accuracy for both of the two main production mechanisms of the SM Higgs boson at the LHC, i.e. the gluon-gluon fusion and the weak vector boson fusion. We also notice that the Higgs signal distribution for the gluon-gluon fusion becomes narrower under the M_T2 cut, while the corresponding background distribution becomes flatter, indicating that one might be able to reduce the systematic uncertainties of mass measurement with an appropriate M_T2 cut.