CMS-PAS-HIG-24-010

CMS-PAS-HIG-24-010
Improved results on Higgs boson pair production in the 4b final state
CMS Collaboration
2025-10-29

Abstract: Measurements of Higgs boson pair (HH) production in the four bottom quark final state are presented using a data set of proton-proton (pp) collisions at $ \sqrt{s}= $ 13.6 TeV collected by the CMS experiment during 2022-2023 and corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 62 fb$ ^{-1} $. Events in which each Higgs boson decay is separately reconstructed as a pair of small-radius jets (resolved), as well as events in which each $ \mathrm{H}\to\mathrm{b}\bar{\mathrm{b}} $ decay is reconstructed as a single large-radius jet (merged) are analyzed exclusively. Benefiting from novel analysis techniques, the combination of resolved and merged channels gives an observed (expected) upper limit at 95% confidence level (CL) on the HH signal strength $ \mu_{\mathrm{HH}} $, defined as the observed HH production cross section divided by the standard model (SM) prediction, of 4.4 (4.4). Compared to previous LHC results, the expected limit with an equivalent integrated luminosity is improved by more than a factor two in the resolved topology and significantly improved in the merged topology as well. The allowed ranges at 95% CL for the Higgs trilinear self-coupling and quartic coupling between two Higgs bosons and two vector bosons, relative to the standard model expectation, are observed (expected, in absence of signal) to be $ [-3.3,9.7] $ ($ [-3.4,10.0] $) and $ [0.63,1.43] $ ($ [0.54,1.51] $), respectively. An updated analysis of the resolved topology using a 13 TeV pp collision data set corresponding to 138 fb$ ^{-1} $ and collected in 2016-2018, reports an observed (expected) 95% CL upper limit on $ \mu_{\mathrm{HH}} $ of 10.0 (5.9), an improvement of about 25% in the expected limit compared to the published results using the same data.
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