Eur. Phys. J. C (2007) 51: 415-420
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-007-0309-4

Special Article - Tools for Experiment and Theory

Maximum significance at the LHC and Higgs decays to muons

¹ Goldhaber Fellow, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Building 510A, Upton, 11973, NY, USA
² Heisenberg Fellow, Max Planck Institute for Physics, Foehringer Ring 6, 80805, Munich, Germany
³ School of Physics, University of Edinburgh, James Clerk Maxwell Building, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, Scotland

^* e-mail: tilman.plehn@cern.ch

Received: 4 December 2006
Revised: 21 February 2007
Published online: 13 June 2007

Abstract

We present a new way to define and compute the maximum significance achievable for signal and background processes at the LHC, using all available phase space information. As an example, we show that a light Higgs boson produced in weak-boson fusion with a subsequent decay into muons can be extracted from the backgrounds. The method, aimed at phenomenological studies, can be incorporated in parton-level event generators and accommodate parametric descriptions of detector effects for selected observables.