CERN Accelerating science

ATLAS Slides
Report number	ATL-PHYS-SLIDE-2025-459
Title	Measurements of Higgs Bosons Decaying to Bottom and Charm Quarks from Vector Boson Fusion Production with the ATLAS Experiment
Author(s)	Vaughan, Luke Martin (Oklahoma State University (US))
Corporate author(s)	The ATLAS collaboration
Collaboration	ATLAS Collaboration
Submitted to	The 32nd International Symposium on Lepton Photon Interactions at High Energies (Lepton Photon 2025), Madison, Wisconsin, Us, 25 - 29 Aug 2025
Submitted by	luke.martin.vaughan@cern.ch on 05 Sep 2025
Subject category	Particle Physics - Experiment
Accelerator/Facility, Experiment	CERN LHC ; ATLAS
Free keywords	VBF ; Hbb ; Hcc ; HIGGS
Abstract	Using 126 fb-1 of Run 2 data collected with the ATLAS detector, a measurement of the $b\bar b$ decay of the Standard Model Higgs boson produced through vector boson fusion yielded a signal strength corresponding to an observed (expected) significance of 2.6 (2.8) standard deviations from the background only hypothesis. This talk will focus on improving the previous measurement by utilizing new developments such as: (1) a new trigger strategy implemented at the end of Run 2 to target inclusive VBF final state, (2) improvements in flavor tagging using newly developed tagger GN2, (3) as well as improvements of the adversarial neural network used for multivariate analysis for the signal extraction. Using 52 fb-1 of Run 3 data, this analysis is combined with the previous Run 2 analysis and adds additional sensitivity to $b\bar b$ decay of the Standard Model VBF Higgs production. Additionally, the inclusive VBF trigger with 90fb-1 of data is used to measure the limit of $c\bar c$ decay of the Standard Model Higgs produced through vector boson fusion.