Discriminating Higgs production mechanisms using jet energy profiles

Understand

We present a new tool for precision measurements of the Higgs boson production mechanisms at the LHC.

• We study events with a Higgs boson produced with two forward jets.
• Even with fairly stringent cuts, one expects a significant contamination of gluon fusion (GF) in addition to vector-boson fusion (VBF) in the event sample.
• By measuring the jet energy profile of the most central jet, we find that SM production can be distinguished from either pure VBF or pure GF at the $5\sigma$ level with 100 fb$^{-1}$ of luminosity at the 14 TeV LHC.