New light on WW scattering at the LHC with W jet tagging

Abstract

After the recent discovery of a 125 GeV Higgs-like particle at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), it is crucial to examine its role in unitarizing high energy W_LW_L scattering, which may reveal its possible deviation from a Standard Model Higgs. We perform an updated study on WW scattering in the semileptonic channel at the LHC, improved by the recently developed W jet tagging method. The resultant statistical significance of a Strongly-Interacting Light Higgs (SILH) model is about 20% larger than that based on the conventionally "gold-plated" dileptonic channel, while 200% more signal events are retained. This allows the discovery of an SILH model if the signal strength is 100% (10%) of a pure Higgsless model, using about 40 (3000) fb^{-1} data at the 14 TeV LHC. Meanwhile, the excellent sensitivity to the anomalous Higgs-W boson coupling makes semileptonic WW scattering an important complement to precision measurements at the Higgs resonance.

25 pages, 4 figures, version published in Phys. Rev. D