One of the primary goals of the Large Hadron Collider is to understand the electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism. In the standard model, electroweak symmetry breaking is described by the Higgs mechanism which includes a scalar Higgs boson. Electroweak measurements constrain the standard model Higgs boson mass to be in the 114.4 to $157\mathrm{GeV}/c^2$ range. For $m_h<135\mathrm{GeV}/c^2$, the Higgs predominantly decays into two $b$-quarks. As such, we investigate the prospect of observing the standard model Higgs decaying to $b\overline{b}$ produced in weak-boson-fusion with an associated central photon. An isolated, high $p_{\mathrm{T}}$, central photon trigger is expected to be available at the ATLAS and CMS experiments. In this study, we investigated the effects originating from showering, hadronization, the underlying event model, and jet performance including $b$-jet calibration on the sensitivity of this channel. We found that the choice of Monte Carlo simulation and its tune has a large effect on the efficacy of the central jet veto and consequently the signal significance. A signal significance of ${1.6}_{-0.3}^{+0.5}$ can be achieved for $m_h=115\mathrm{GeV}/c^2$ with $100{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity which correspond to 1 yr at design luminosity at 14 TeV $pp$ collisions.

• Received 5 April 2010

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.82.093002