Search for the exotic decay of the Higgs boson into two light pseudoscalars with four photons in the final state in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV

CMS Collaboration

Preprint

PUBDB-2022-05132

Search for the exotic decay of the Higgs boson into two light pseudoscalars with four photons in the final state in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV

CMS Collaboration (Collaboration author)DESY*

2022

[10.3204/PUBDB-2022-05132]

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Please use a persistent id in citations: doi:10.3204/PUBDB-2022-05132

Report No.: CERN-EP-2022-095; CMS-HIG-21-003; arXiv:2208.01469

Abstract: A search for the exotic decay of the Higgs boson to a pair of light pseudoscalars, each of which subsequently decays into a pair of photons, is presented. The search uses data from proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV recorded with the CMS detector at the LHC that corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 132 fb$^{-1}$. The analysis probes pseudoscalar bosons with masses in the range 15-62 GeV, coming from the Higgs boson decay, which leads to four well-isolated photons in the final state. No significant deviation from the background-only hypothesis is observed. Upper limits are set on the product of the Higgs boson production cross section and branching fraction into four photons. The observed (expected) limits range from 0.80 (1.00) fb for a pseudoscalar boson mass of 15 GeV to 0.26 (0.24) fb for a mass of 62 GeV at 95% confidence level.

Keyword(s): p p: colliding beams ; decay: exotic ; p p: scattering ; boson: mass ; Higgs particle: hadroproduction ; Higgs particle: decay modes ; Higgs particle: rare decay ; photon ; mass: pseudoscalar ; Higgs particle: branching ratio ; channel cross section: branching ratio: upper limit ; mass dependence ; CERN LHC Coll ; CMS ; experimental results ; 13000 GeV-cms

Note: Submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physics. All figures and tables can be found at http://cms-results.web.cern.ch/cms-results/public-results/publications/HIG-21-003 (CMS Public Pages)

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