Search for Nonresonant Pair Production of Highly Energetic Higgs Bosons Decaying to Bottom Quarks

Abstract

A search for nonresonant Higgs boson (H) pair production via gluon and vector boson (V) fusion is performed in the four-bottom-quark final state, using proton-proton collision data at 13 TeV corresponding to 138 fb$^{-1}$ collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC. The analysis targets Lorentz-boosted H pairs identified using a graph neural network. It constrains the strengths relative to the standard model of the H self-coupling and the quartic VVHH couplings, $κ_{2V}$, excluding $κ_{2V}$ = 0 for the first time, with a significance of 6.3 standard deviations when other H couplings are fixed to their standard model values.Replaced with the published version. Added the journal reference and the DOI. All the figures and tables, including additional supplementary figures and tables, can be found at http://cms-results.web.cern.ch/cms-results/public-results/publications/B2G-22-003 (CMS Public Pages)