Search for the $H \rightarrow \text{W}^+ \text{W}^-$ process at the LHeC Experiment

Abstract

We consider the decay of the Higgs boson to W$^{+}$ W$^{-}$ at a proposed Large Hadron Electron Collider and determine the likelihood of detecting a signal for the Higgs mass from its decay product W jets by imposing cuts to select candidate jet pairs and optimizing the value of the angular separation $\Delta R$. It was found that at the LHeC experiment (CM energy $\sqrt{s}=1.3$ TeV and luminosity of 100 fb$^{-1}$ per year), the highest efficiency is obtained with $\Delta R = 0.4$, along with a selection scheme of $|\Delta \eta| <1, 10<m<85$ GeV, $p_T$ of jets 1 and 2 between $10 - 20$ GeV and $p_T$ of jets 3 and 4 $>10$ GeV: this led to an efficiency between $7.1 - 7.5 \%$ for finding the invariant 4-jet mass in a mass region $<140$ GeV. Under signal-to-background comparison, the signal showed a $3.8 \sigma$ excess compared to the charged current W$^{-}$ background.