UC Santa Cruz

A search for high-momentum Higgs bosons, produced with an associated jet and decaying to bottom quark pairs, is conducted using an integrated luminosity of 80.5 fb−1 of proton-proton collisions at sqrt{s} = 13 TeV collected with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. The search for H → bb is of particular importance, as current measurements of this decay channel contain large uncertainties and have not yet established evidence for the gluon-gluon fusion and vector boson fusion Higgs boson production modes. This is the first time this analysis has been performed with sqrt{s} = 13 TeV at ATLAS and represents an important advancement in the use of boosted jet techniques including implementation of the Variable Radius jet algorithm. Furthermore, a novel tt control region strategy is implemented to correct the mismodeling of its normalization and is shown to constrain the associated large JES and JMR systematic uncertainties. For the Standard Model Higgs boson, the observed signal strength is μH = 5.8 ± 3.1 (stat.) ± 1.9 (syst.) ± 1.7 (theo.), which is 1.6 standard deviations higher than the background-only hypothesis, with an expected sensitivity of 0.28σ.