Boson fusion and Higgs production at the CERN LHC in six fermion final states with one charged lepton pair

Elena Accomando, Alessandro Ballestrero, Aissa Belhouari, and Ezio Maina

Phys. Rev. D 75, 113006 – Published 20 June 2007

Abstract

Boson boson scattering and Higgs production in boson boson fusion will be actively investigated at the CERN LHC. We have performed a parton level study of all processes of the type $q_{1} q_{2} \to q_{3} q_{4} q_{5} q_{6} l^{+} l^{-}$ using for the first time a full fledged six fermion Monte Carlo event generator which employs exact matrix elements at $O (α_{e m}^{6})$ . We have examined Higgs production in vector boson fusion followed by the decay chain $H \to Z Z \to l^{+} l^{-} j j$ , including exactly all electroweak irreducible backgrounds. In the high mass region we have compared the case of a relatively light Higgs with the no-Higgs results. The integrated cross section for the latter case is more than twice that in the former for a minimum invariant mass of the $Z V$ pair of about 800 GeV. We find, in a preliminary analysis at parton level, that, summing up the muon and the electron channels, about 25 events are expected in the light Higgs case for $L = 100 {fb}^{- 1}$ .