Higgs mass determination from direct reconstruction at a Linear e=e- Collider

Abstract

We study the feasibility of a precise measurement of the mass of a 120 GeV MSM Higgs boson through direct reconstruction of ZH->qqH events that would be achieved in a future e+e- linear collider operating at a center-of-mass energy of 500 GeV. Much effort has been put in a ``realistic simulation'' by including irreducible and reducible backgrounds, realistic detector effects and reconstruction procedures and sophisticated analysis tools involving Neural Networks and kinematical fitting. As a result, the Higgs mass is determined with a statistical accuracy of 50 MeV and the Z-Higgs Yukawa coupling measured to 0.7%, assuming 500 fb^-1 of integrated luminosity.