Measuring the Higgs boson mass with transverse mass variables

Abstract

We provide a comparative study of the Higgs boson mass measurements based on two approaches to the dileptonic decay of W bosons produced by the Higgs boson decay, one using the kinematic variable M(T)(true) and the other using the M(T2)-assisted on-shell reconstruction of the invisible neutrino momenta. We find that these two approaches can determine the Higgs boson mass with a similar accuracy for both of the two main production mechanisms of the SM Higgs boson at the LHC, i.e. the gluon-gluon fusion and the weak vector boson fusion. We also notice that the Higgs signal distribution for the gluon-gluon fusion becomes narrower under the M(T2) cut, while the corresponding background distribution becomes flatter, indicating that one might be able to reduce the systematic uncertainties of mass measurement with an appropriate M(T2) cut.