Measurement of boosted Higgs bosons produced via vector boson fusion or gluon fusion in the H →bb¯ decay mode using LHC proton-proton collision data at s = 13 TeV

Abstract

A measurement is performed of Higgs bosons produced with high transverse momentum (pT) via vector boson or gluon fusion in proton-proton collisions. The result is based on a data set with a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV collected in 2016-2018 with the CMS detector at the LHC and corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 138 fb-1. The decay of a high-pT Higgs boson to a boosted bottom quark-antiquark pair is selected using largeradius jets and employing jet substructure and heavy-favor taggers based on machine learning techniques. Independent regions targeting the vector boson and gluon fusion mechanisms are defned based on the topology of two quark-initiated jets with large pseudorapidity separation. The signal strengths for both processes are extracted simultaneously by performing a maximum likelihood ft to data in the large-radius jet mass distribution. The observed signal strengths relative to the standard model expectation are 4.9 +1.9 -1.6 and 1.6 +1.7 -1.5 for the vector boson and gluon fusion mechanisms, respectively. A diferential cross section measurement is also reported in the simplifed template cross section framework.