Study of the mass and spin-parity of the Higgs boson candidate via its decays to Z boson pairs

Abstract

A study is presented of the mass and spin-parity of the new boson recently observed at the LHC at a mass near 125 GeV. An integrated luminosity of 17.3 inverse femtobarns, collected by the CMS experiment in proton-proton collisions at center-of-mass energies of 7 and 8 TeV, is used. The measured mass in the ZZ channel, where both Z bosons decay to e or mu pairs, is 126.2 +/- 0.6 (stat.) +/- 0.2 (syst.) GeV. The angular distributions of the lepton pairs in this channel are sensitive to the spin-parity of the boson. Under the assumption of spin 0, the present data are consistent with the pure scalar hypothesis, while disfavoring the pure pseudoscalar hypothesis.