Signature of the Intermediate Mass Higgs Boson at the LHC With Flavor Tagging

Abstract

We revisit the exclusive signature $e^\pm (\mu^\pm) + b\bar b$ in the associated production of the intermediate mass Higgs boson with a $W$ boson. We show that it is feasible to use this signature to identify the Higgs boson in the lower intermediate mass region ($90$ to $130$ GeV) at the LHC with reasonable acceptance cuts by assuming effective bottom-jet identification. We further demonstrate that the background can be reduced with judicious cuts down to the level of the signal.