Search for heavy resonances decaying into a vector boson and a Higgs boson in final states with charged leptons, neutrinos, and b quarks

Abstract

A search for heavy resonances decaying to a Higgs boson and a vector boson is presented. The analysis is performed using data samples collected in 2015 by the CMS experiment at the LHC in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV, corresponding to integrated luminosities of 2.2-2.5 inverse femtobarns. The search is performed in channels in which the vector boson decays into leptonic final states (Z to nu nu, W to l nu, and Z to l l, with l = e, mu), while the Higgs boson decays to collimated b quark pairs detected as a single massive jet. The discriminating power of a jet mass requirement and a b jet tagging algorithm are exploited to suppress the standard model backgrounds. The event yields observed in data are consistent with the background expectation. In the context of a theoretical model with a heavy vector triplet, a resonance with mass less than 2 TeV is excluded at 95% confidence level. The results are also interpreted in terms of limits on the parameters of the model, improving on the reach of previous searches.Replaced with the published version. Added the journal reference. All the figures and tables can be found at http://cms-results.web.cern.ch/cms-results/public-results/publications/B2G-16-003/index.html