Accelerator Neutrinos

Abstract:

Abstract The paper presents a measurement of the Standard Model Higgs Boson decaying to b -quark pairs in the vector boson fusion (VBF) production mode. A sample corresponding to 126 $$\hbox {fb}^{-1}$$ fb - 1 of $$\sqrt{s} = 13\,\text {TeV}$$ s = 13 TeV proton–proton collision data, collected with the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, is analyzed utilizing an adversarial neural network for event classification. The signal strength, defined as the ratio of the measured signal yield to that predicted by the Standard Model for VBF Higgs production, is measured to be $$0.95^{+0.38}_{-0.36}$$ 0 . 95 - 0.36 + 0.38 , corresponding to an observed (expected) significance of 2.6 (2.8) standard deviations from the background only hypothesis. The results are additionally combined with an analysis of Higgs bosons decaying to b -quarks, produced via VBF in association with a photon.

Abstract:

Not all experiments publish their results with a description of the correlations between the data points. This makes it difficult to do hypothesis tests or model fits with that data, since just assuming no correlation can lead to an overestimation or underestimation of the resulting uncertainties. This work presents robust test statistics that can be used with datasets with missing correlation information. They are exact in the case of no correlation and either guaranteed to be conservative—i.e., the uncertainty is never underestimated—in the presence of correlations, or they are also exact in the degenerate case of perfect correlation between the data points.