Evidence for a particle produced in association with weak bosons and decaying to a bottom-antibottom quark pair in Higgs boson searches at the Tevatron
(Submitted on 27 Jul 2012 (v1), last revised 6 Aug 2012 (this version, v2))
We combine searches by the CDF and D0 Collaborations for the associated production of a Higgs boson with a W or Z boson and subsequent decay of the Higgs boson to a bottom-antibottom quark pair. The data, originating from Fermilab Tevatron p-pbar collisions at sqrt{s}=1.96 TeV, correspond to integrated luminosities of up to 9.7 fb^-1. The searches are conducted for a Higgs boson with mass in the range 100-150 GeV/c^2. We observe an excess of events in the data compared with the background predictions, which is most significant in the mass range between 120 and 135 GeV/c^2. The largest local significance is 3.3 standard deviations, corresponding to a global significance of 3.1 standard deviations. We interpret this as evidence for the presence of a new particle consistent with the standard model Higgs boson, which is produced in association with a weak vector boson and decays to a bottom-antibottom quark pair.
Comments: Submitted to Phys. Rev. Lett
Subjects: High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex)
Report number: FERMILAB-PUB-12-412-E
Cite as: arXiv:1207.6436v2 [hep-ex]
Submission history
From: Thomas Junk [view email]
[v1] Fri, 27 Jul 2012 01:57:22 GMT (46kb)
[v2] Mon, 6 Aug 2012 04:06:07 GMT (46kb)
+++++