https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-021-09137-1
Regular Article - Experimental Physics
The anomalous production of multi-leptons and its impact on the measurement of Wh production at the LHC
1
School of Physics and Institute for Collider Particle Physics, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), 2050, Johannesburg, South Africa
2
Department of Physics, University of Johannesburg, PO Box 524, 2006, Auckland Park, South Africa
3
Institute of High Energy Physics, 19B, Yuquan Road, Shijing District, 100049, Beijing, China
4
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), 19A Yuquan Road, Shijing District, 100049, Beijing, China
5
iThemba LABS, National Research Foundation, PO Box 722, 7129, Somerset West, South Africa
Received:
29
October
2020
Accepted:
13
April
2021
Published online:
27
April
2021
Anomalies in multi-lepton final states at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have been reported in Refs. (von Buddenbrock et al., J Phys G 45(11):115003, arXiv:1711.07874 [hep-ph], 2018; Buddenbrock et al., JHEP 1910:157, arXiv:1901.05300 [hep-ph], 2019). These can be interpreted in terms of the production of a heavy boson, H, decaying into a standard model (SM) Higgs boson, h, and a singlet scalar, S, which is treated as a SM Higgs-like boson. This process would naturally affect the measurement of the Wh signal strength at the LHC, where h is produced in association with leptons and di-jets. Here, h would be produced with lower transverse momentum, 
, compared to SM processes. Corners of the phase-space are fixed according to the model parameters derived in Refs. (von Buddenbrock et al., J Phys G 45(11):115003, arXiv:1711.07874 [hep-ph], 2018; von Buddenbrock et al., Eur Phys J C 76(10):580, arXiv:1606.01674 [hep-ph], 2016) without additional tuning, thus nullifying potential look-else-where effects or selection biases. Provided that no stringent requirements are made on or related observables, the signal strength of Wh is 
. This corresponds to a deviation from the SM of 
. This result further strengthens the need to measure with precision the SM Higgs boson couplings in 
, and 
collisions, in addition to pp collisions.
© The Author(s) 2021
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