The anomalous production of multi-lepton and its impact on the measurement of Wh production at the LHC
Yesenia Hernandez, Alan S. Cornell, Mukesh Kumar, Bruce Mellado, Xifeng Ruan
Statistically compelling anomalies in multi-lepton final states at the Large Hadron Collider, LHC, have been reported in Refs.[arXiv:1711.07874, arXiv:1901.0530]. These can be interpreted in terms of the production of a heavy boson, H, decaying into a Standard Model (SM) Higgs boson, h, and a singlet scalar, S, which is treated as a SM Higgs-like boson, where mH≈270 GeV and mS≈150 GeV. This process would affect the measurement of the Wh signal strength at the LHC, where h is produced in association with leptons and di-jets. Here, h would be produced with lower transverse momentum, pTh, compared to the SM process. Provided that no stringent requirements are made on pTh, the signal strength of Wh is μ(Wh)=2.51±0.43, which corresponds to a deviation from the SM of 3.5σ. This result further enriches the plethora of multi-lepton anomalies at the LHC. If confirmed with more Run 2 data, this result would indicate that the Higgs boson produced at the LHC is contaminated with production mechanisms other than in the SM. In turn, this compromises the ability of high energy proton-proton collisions to gain access to the couplings of the Higgs boson to SM particles in a model-independent way, as opposed to e+e− and to, a less extent, e−p collisions.