Constraints on off-shell Higgs boson production and the Higgs boson total width in $ZZ\to4\ell$ and $ZZ\to2\ell2\nu$ final states with the ATLAS detector

Understand

A measurement of off-shell Higgs boson production in the $ZZ\to4\ell$ and $ZZ\to2\ell2\nu$ decay channels, where $\ell$ stands for either an electron or a muon, is performed using data from proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of $\sqrt{s}=13$ TeV.

• The data were collected by the ATLAS experiment in 2015 and 2016 at the Large Hadron Collider, and they correspond to an integrated luminosity of 36.1 fb$^{-1}$.
• An observed (expected) upper limit on the off-shell Higgs signal strength, defined as the event yield normalised to the Standard Model prediction, of 3.8 (3.4) is obtained at 95% confidence level (CL).
• Assuming the ratio of the Higgs boson couplings to the Standard Model predictions is independent of the momentum transfer of the Higgs production mechanism considered in the analysis, a combination with the on-shell signal-strength measurements yields an observed (expected) 95% CL upper limit on the Higgs boson total width of 14.4 (15.2) MeV.