Search for the associated production of charm quarks and a Higgs boson decaying into a photon pair with the ATLAS detector

Journal article

A search for the production of a Higgs boson and one or more charm quarks, in which the Higgs boson decays into a photon pair, is presented. This search uses proton-proton collision data with a centre-of-mass energy of s = 13 TeV and an integrated luminosity of 140 fb−1 recorded by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. The analysis relies on the identification of charm-quark-containing jets, and adopts an approach based on Gaussian process regression to model the non-resonant di-photon background. The observed (expected, assuming the Standard Model signal) upper limit at the 95% confidence level on the cross-section for producing a Higgs boson and at least one charm-quark-containing jet that passes a fiducial selection is found to be 10.6 pb (8.8 pb). The observed (expected) measured cross-section for this process is 5.3 ± 3.2 pb (2.9 ± 3.1 pb).

Authors: Aad, G; Aakvaag, E; Abbott, B; Abdelhameed, S; Abeling, K

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Springer
• Journal: Journal of High Energy Physics
• Volume: 2025
• Issue: 2
• Article number: 45
• Publication date: 2025-02-11
• Acceptance date: 2024-11-09
• DOI: 10.1007/jhep02(2025)045
• EISSN: 1029-8479
• ISSN: 1126-6708
• Language: English
• Keywords: Higgs Physics; Hadron-Hadron Scattering