Limits on the Higgs boson lifetime and width from its decay to four charged leptons

• Main Authors: Apyan, Aram (Contributor), Barbieri, Richard Alexander (Contributor), Baty, Austin Alan (Contributor), Bierwagen, Katharina (Contributor), Brandt, Stephanie Akemi (Contributor), Busza, Wit (Contributor), Cali, Ivan Amos (Contributor), Demiragli, Zeynep (Contributor), Di Matteo, Leonardo (Contributor), Gomez-Ceballos, Guillelmo (Contributor), Goncharov, Maxim (Contributor), Gulhan, Doga Can (Contributor), Innocenti, Gian Michele (Contributor), Klute, Markus (Contributor), Kovalskyi, Dmytro (Contributor), Lai, Yue Shi (Contributor), Lee, Yen-Jie (Contributor), Levin, Andrew Michael (Contributor), Luckey, P. David, Jr (Contributor), McGinn, Christopher Francis (Contributor), Mironov, Camelia Maria (Contributor), Niu, Xinmei (Contributor), Paus, Christoph M. E. (Contributor), Ralph, Duncan Kelley (Contributor), Roland, Christof E. (Contributor), Roland, Gunther M. (Contributor), Salfeld-Nebgen, Jakob Maxillia (Contributor), Stephans, George S. F. (Contributor), Sumorok, Konstanty C. (Contributor), Varma, Mukund (Contributor), Velicanu, Dragos Alexandru (Contributor), Veverka, Jan (Contributor), Wang, J. (Contributor), Wang, Ta-Wei (Contributor), Wyslouch, Boleslaw (Contributor), Yang, Mingming (Contributor), Zhukova, Victoria (Contributor)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Laboratory for Nuclear Science (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. School of Science (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: American Physical Society, 2016-01-28T01:57:27Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

Constraints on the lifetime and width of the Higgs boson are obtained from H → ZZ → 4ℓ events using data recorded by the CMS experiment during the LHC run 1 with an integrated luminosity of 5.1 and 19.7  fb[superscript −1] at a center-of-mass energy of 7 and 8 TeV, respectively. The measurement of the Higgs boson lifetime is derived from its flight distance in the CMS detector with an upper bound of τ[subscript H] < 1.9 × 10[superscript −13]  s at the 95% confidence level (C.L.), corresponding to a lower bound on the width of Γ[subscript H] > 3.5 × 10[superscript −9]  MeV. The measurement of the width is obtained from an off-shell production technique, generalized to include anomalous couplings of the Higgs boson to two electroweak bosons. From this measurement, a joint constraint is set on the Higgs boson width and a parameter f[subscript ΛQ] that expresses an anomalous coupling contribution as an on-shell cross-section fraction. The limit on the Higgs boson width is Γ[subscript H] < 46  MeV with f[subscript ΛQ] unconstrained and Γ[subscript H] < 26  MeV for f[subscript ΛQ] = 0 at the 95% C.L. The constraint f[subscript ΛQ] < 3.8 × 10[superscript −3] at the 95% C.L. is obtained for the expected standard model Higgs boson width.
United States. Dept. of Energy
National Science Foundation (U.S.)
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation