Development of Charm Tagging in order to Constrain the Higgs Decay to Charm Quarks with the ATLAS Detector at the LHC


  Jonathan Shlomi  ,  Eilam Gross  
Weizmann Institute

 

The Higgs Boson was directly observed only in its decay modes to the Gauge Bosons (photons, W and Z). No clear and direct signs for Higgs decaying to second generation elementary particles have been seen yet, by any of the experiments alone. Until we clearly observe the Higgs Boson decay to second generation particles, we would not have clear evidence for the role of the BEH mechanism in giving mass to matter particles. Though it looks like it will be hard to attain enough sensitivity to observe a Standard Model Higgs decay to charm quarks in the ongoing Run 2 of the LHC within the next years, we can directly prove that the Higgs coupling to quarks is not universal, which by itself, is a great achievement. Moreover, it is not inconceivable that the strength of the Yukawa couplings of the Higgs to the lighter generation significantly differ from the Standard Model prediction. Therefore, constraining the Higgs coupling to charm quarks can shed light on the mechanism of the origin of flavour.

The improvement in the performance of the ATLAS experiment to heavy flavour tagging, due to the addition of an additional inner layer to the pixel detector, (IBL), is an open invitation for charm tagging. We are  developing a new charm tagger using boosted decision trees (BDT). This tagger is optimised to improve the performance of ATLAS in tagging heavy quark jets and rejecting light jet background. The tagger is intended to be a central piece in an analysis used to establish proof for non-universality of the Higgs Boson coupling and get us closer to the observation of Higgs decaying to charm quarks.