Sensitivity of LHC experiments to the $t\bar{t}H$ final state, with $H \rightarrow b\bar{b}$, at center of mass energy of 14 TeV

Ricardo Goncalo, Stefan Guindon, Vivek Jain

Published 2013-10-01, updated 2013-10-02Version 2

With the discovery of a Higgs-like particle in 2012, attention has now turned to measuring its properties, e.g., coupling to various bosonic and fermionic final states, its spin and parity, etc. In this note, we study the sensitivity of experiments at the LHC to its coupling to the top quark, by searching for the process pp $\rightarrow t\bar{t}H$, where the primary decay mode of the $H$ is $\rightarrow b\bar{b}$. In this paper, the $t\bar{t}$ system is detected in the dilepton final state. This study is performed assuming a center of mass energy of 14 TeV and integrated luminosities of 300 fb$^{-1}$ (with an average pileup ($\mu$) of 50 additional collisions per bunch crossing) and 3000 fb$^{-1}$ (with $\mu=140$). We include systematic uncertainties in production cross-sections as well as the more important experimental uncertainties. Preliminary studies indicate that we will observe the $t\bar{t}H$ final state with a significance of 2.4 and $\ge 5.3$ for the two luminosity scenarios, respectively; addition of other $t\bar{t}$ final states should increase the overall significance for observing $t\bar{t}H$.