Prospects for Observing an Invisibly Decaying Higgs Boson in the t anti-t H Production at the LHC

Abstract

The prospects for observing an invisibly decaying Higgs boson in the t anti-t H production at LHC are discussed. An isolated lepton, reconstructed hadronic top-quark decay, two identified b-jets and large missing transverse energy are proposed as the final state signature for event selection. Only the Standard Model backgrounds are taken into account. It is shown that the t anti-t Z, t anti-t W, b anti-b Z and b anti-b W backgrounds can individually be suppressed below the signal expectation. The dominant source of background remains the t anti-t production. The key for observability will be an experimental selection which allows further suppression of the contributions from the t anti-t events with one of the top-quarks decaying into a tau lepton. Depending on the details of the final analysis, an excess of the signal events above the Standard Model background of about 10% to 100% can be achieved in the mass range m_H= 100-200 GeV.