Angular distributions in tt¯H(H→bb¯) reconstructed events at the LHC

The associated production of a Higgs boson and a top-quark pair, tt¯H, in proton-proton collisions is addressed in this paper for a center of mass energy of 13TeV at the LHC. Dileptonic final states of tt¯H events with two oppositely charged leptons and four jets from the decays t→bW+→bℓ+νℓ, t¯→b¯W−→b¯ℓ−ν¯ℓ and h→bb¯, are used. Signal events, generated with MadGraph5_aMC@NLO, are fully reconstructed by applying a kinematic fit. New angular distributions of the decay products as well as angular asymmetries are explored in order to improve discrimination of tt¯H signal events over the dominant irreducible background contribution, tt¯bb¯. Even after the full kinematic fit reconstruction of the events, the proposed angular distributions and asymmetries are still quite different in the tt¯H signal and the dominant background (tt¯bb¯).

This work was partially supported by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, FCT (projects CERN/FP/123619/2011 and EXPL/FIS-NUC/1705/2013, grants SFRH/BI/52524/2014 and SFRH/BD/73438/2010, and contracts IF/00050/2013 and IF/00014/2012). The work of M.C.N. Fiolhais was supported by LIP-Laboratório de Instrumentação e Física Experimental de Partículas, Portugal (grant PestIC/FIS/LA007/2013). The work of R.S. is supported in part by FCT under contract PTDC/FIS/117951/2010. Special thanks go to Juan Antonio Aguilar-Saavedra for all the fruitful discussions and a long term collaboration.