DISCOVERY AND CHARACTERIZATION OF A HIGGS-LIKE RESONANCE USING THE MATRIX ELEMENT LIKELIHOOD APPROACH
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Date
2013-10-24
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Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
Understanding the exact mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking through
the discovery and characterization of the Higgs boson is one of the primary goals of
the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Two searches for a Higgs boson decaying to a pair
of Z bosons with subsequent decays to either 2l2q or 4l are presented using data
recorded with the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS). The discovery and characteriza-
tion of a Higgs-like resonance using a new set of tools is reported. The foundations of
such tools are developed and prospects for their use in other Higgs channels and at
future colliders are addressed. Although the Standard Model (SM) of electroweak in-
teractions has been extremely successful in describing a number of phenomena, there
are still questions to be addressed pertaining to its naturalness and its possible con-
nection to beyond the SM physics. Results are interpreted in the context of possible
extensions to the SM and their effect on our understanding of the universe.
Description
Keywords
higgs, electroweak symmetry breaking, MELA, matrix element