Cross-section measurements of boosted Higgs boson production in final states with pairs of hadronically decaying $τ$-leptons with the ATLAS experiment

Abstract

Cross section measurements of high-Lorentz boosted Higgs boson production in final states with pairs of hadronically decaying $τ$-leptons are presented. The analysis is based on the full Run 2 data sample of proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of $\sqrt{s} = 13$ TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 140 $\mathrm{fb}^{-1}$, and a partial Run 3 data sample at $\sqrt{s} = 13.6$ TeV with an integrated luminosity of 162 $\mathrm{fb}^{-1}$ collected in 2022-2024 with the ATLAS experiment. The analysis extends the sensitivity of previous $H \to ττ$ measurements to Higgs boson transverse momenta above 300 GeV by reconstructing $τ$-lepton pairs produced with a small separation in large radius jets. The standard reconstruction of hadronic $τ$-leptons has limited efficiency in this phase space, requiring dedicated boosted di-$τ$ reconstruction and identification techniques, combined with multivariate analysis methods, to extract the signal. For Higgs boson transverse momenta above 300 GeV, results are presented for both inclusive and differential cross-sections. Within the simplified template cross-section framework, differential cross-section measurements in Higgs boson transverse momentum for gluon-gluon fusion production are provided, together with an inclusive cross-section measurement for vector-boson fusion production. For the inclusive measurement, the analysis yields an observed (expected) significance of 3.8 (3.3) standard deviations over the background-only hypothesis, providing evidence of Higgs boson production in the boosted regime of the di-$τ$ final state.