Ditau-jet tagging and boosted Higgs bosons from a multi-TeV resonance

Abstract

New TeV-scale physics processes at the LHC can produce Higgs bosons with substantive transverse Lorentz boost, such that the Higgs's decay products are nominally contained in a single jet. In the case of a light Higgs decaying predominantly to b (b) over bar, previous studies have shown that these Higgs jets can be identified by capitalizing on jet substructure techniques. In this work, we explore the possibility of also utilizing the subdominant but very distinctive decay h -> tau(+) tau(-). To this end, we introduce the concept of a "ditau jet," or a jet consisting of two semicollinear taus where one or both decay hadronically. We perform simple modifications to ordinary tau tagging methods to account for this configuration, and estimate tag rates of O(50%) and QCD mistag rates of O(10(-4)-10(-3)) for p(T) similar to TeV, even in the presence of pileup. We further demonstrate the feasibility of reconstructing the ditau invariant mass by using traditional E(T) decaying to Zh, utilizing both leptonic and hadronic Z decay channels. The leptonic Z channel is limited due to low statistics, but the hadronic Z channel is potentially competitive with other searches.