Higgs spin determination in the WW channel and beyond

Abstract

After the discovery of the 126 GeV resonance at the LHC, the determination of its features, including its spin, is a very important ongoing task. In order to distinguish the two most likely spin hypotheses, spin-0 or spin-2, we study the phenomenology of a light Higgs-like spin-2 resonance produced in different gluon-fusion and vector-boson-fusion processes at the LHC. Starting from an effective model for the interaction of a spin-2 particle with the SM gauge bosons, we calculate cross sections and differential distributions within the Monte Carlo program Vbfnlo . We find that with specific model parameters such a spin-2 resonance can mimic SM Higgs rates and transverse-momentum distributions in γγ,WW , and ZZ decays, whereas several distributions allow to separate spin-2 from spin-0, independently of the spin-2 model parameters

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