Search for Double Higgs Production in the Final State with Two Photons and Two Bottom Quarks at the CMS Detector

Abstract

A search for the production of Higgs pairs in the decay channel with two photons and two bottom quarks is reported for both resonant and nonresonant cases. The data corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 19.7 /fb of proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 8 TeV collected by the CMS detector at the CERN Large Hardron Collider. The candidate events are selected by requiring two photons and two jets and are classified according to the number of jets tagged as coming from the hadronization of a bottom quark. The search for resonance production of two Higgs bosons through a new particle as hypothesized in extensions to the Standard Model involving a Radion or KK-graviton from models with warped extra dimensions or involving a heavy Higgs from models with supersymmetry, is performed on the resonant mass range from 260 GeV to 1100 GeV. The search for Standard Model nonresonant production of two Higgs bosons is performed; in addition a theoretical framework is explored for the analysis of anomalous values of the couplings ttH, HHH, and ttHH. The observations are consistent with background expectations. Upper limits at the 95% confidence level are extracted on the production cross section of resonant and SM nonresonant production. In particular, the Radion with a vacuum expectation of 1 TeV is observed (expected) to be excluded with masses below 0.97 TeV (0.88 TeV), while the analysis is not sensitive to the Radion with a vacuum expectation of 3 TeV. The nonresonant double Higgs cross section is observed (expected) to be excluded at 1.91 fb (1.59 fb) or 72.9 (60.7) times the NNLO Standard Model value.