Exploring Peaks and Valleys in the Diphoton Spectrum

Abstract

We investigate the effects of resonance-continuum interference on the diphoton spectrum in the presence of a new spin-0 or spin-2 state produced via gluons or quarks and decaying to pairs of photons. Interference effects can significantly influence the extraction of resonance masses and widths from the diphoton spectrum, particularly in the case of a spin-2 resonance produced via quarks. We illustrate these effects via a binned likelihood analysis of LHC diphoton data at both 8 and 13 TeV.

v2: Added sections discussing 2016 data