Search for Nonresonant Pair Production of Highly Energetic Higgs Bosons Decaying to Bottom Quarks

A search for nonresonant Higgs boson (H) pair production via gluon and vector boson (V) fusion is performed in the four-bottom-quark final state, using proton-proton collision data at 13 TeV corresponding to 138 fb-1 collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC. The analysis targets Lorentz-boosted H pairs identified using a graph neural network. It constrains the strengths relative to the standard model of the H self-coupling and the quartic VVHH couplings, & kappa;2V, excluding & kappa;2V 1/4 0 for the first time, with a significance of 6.3 standard deviations when other H couplings are fixed to their standard model values.

Automated summary

This study performs a search for nonresonant Higgs boson pair production via gluon and vector boson fusion, focusing on the final state with four bottom quarks. Using data from the LHC, the analysis identifies Lorentz-boosted Higgs pairs with a graph neural network and constrains the couplings of the Higgs self-interaction and the quartic VVHH interaction. The study excludes certain parameter values for the first time and achieves a significance of 6.3 standard deviations when other Higgs couplings are fixed.