Measuring spin and CP from semi-hadronic ZZ decays using jet substructure

We apply novel jet techniques to investigate the spin and CP quantum numbers of a heavy resonance X, singly produced in pp -> X -> ZZ -> l(+)l(-)jj at the LHC. We take into account all dominant background processes to show that this channel, which has been considered unobservable until now, can qualify under realistic conditions to supplement measurements of the purely leptonic decay channels X -> ZZ -> 4l. We perform a detailed investigation of spin- and CP-sensitive angular observables on the fully-simulated final state for various spin and CP quantum numbers of the state X, tracing how potential sensitivity communicates through all the steps of a subjet analysis. This allows us to elaborate on the prospects and limitations of performing such measurements with the semihadronic final state. We find our analysis particularly sensitive to a CP-even or CP-odd scalar resonance, while, for tensorial and vectorial resonances, discriminative features are diminished in the boosted kinematical regime.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables, published versio

Precise predictions for (non-standard) W+photon+jet production

We report on a detailed investigation of the next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD corrections to $W\gamma$+jet production at the Tevatron and the LHC using a fully-flexible parton-level Monte Carlo program. We include the full leptonic decay of the $W$, taking into account all off-shell and finite width effects, as well as non-standard $WW\gamma$ couplings. We find particularly sizable corrections for the currently allowed parameter range of anomalous couplings imposed by LEP data. In total the NLO differential distributions reveal a substantial phase space dependence of the corrections, leaving considerable sensitivity to anomalous couplings beyond scale uncertainty at large momentum transfers in the anomalous vertex.Comment: 22 pages, 14 figures, 2 tables, published versio

Ditau jets in Higgs searches

Understanding and identifying ditau jets -- jets consisting of pairs of tau particles, can be of crucial importance and may even turn out to be a necessity if the Higgs boson decays dominantly to new light scalars which, on the other hand, decay to tau pairs. As often seen in various models of BSM such as in the NMSSM, Higgs portals etc., the lightness of these new states ensures their large transverse momenta and, as a consequence, the collinearity of their decay products. We show that the non-standard signatures of these objects, which can easily be missed by standard analysis techniques, can be superbly exploited in an analysis based on subjet observables. When combined with additional selection strategies, this analysis can even facilitate an early discovery of the Higgs boson. To be specific, a light Higgs can be found with $S/\sqrt{B} \gtrsim 5$ from $\mathcal {L} \simeq 12 fb^{-1}$ of data. We combine all these observables into a single discriminating likelihood that can be employed toward the construction of a realistic and standalone ditau tagger.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figures. References added, typos corrected, published versio

Reconstructing the invisible with matrix elements

We propose a fully flexible method to perform an hypothesis test between signal and background based on the Matrix Element Method in the presence of multiple invisible particles. The proposed method performs a mapping of the measured final state onto its minimal hypersurface of degrees of freedom for a given process and then maximises the matrix element on this hypersurface separately for signal and background. To show how performant the method is in separating signal from background, we apply it to the prominent partly invisible decay of a Higgs boson into a muon-antimuon pair and two muon-neutrinos via two W bosons.Comment: 4 page