# The 2009 Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics

Jul 16 – 22, 2009
Kraków, Poland
Europe/Warsaw timezone

## High-mass Higgs search and combined discovery prospects at the LHC

Jul 16, 2009, 5:00 PM
20m
Large Lecture - Hall B (Kraków, Poland)

### Large Lecture - Hall B

#### Kraków, Poland

The Auditorium Maximum of the Jagiellonian University 33 Krupnicza Street 31-123 Kraków
Higgs and New Physics

### Speaker

Ms Cristina Botta (University of Turin and INFN)

### Description

We present the discovery potential of the ATLAS and CMS detectors at the LHC for a neutral Higgs boson decaying to ZZ(*) -> 4 leptons (electrons or muons) or to WW(*) -> l nu l' nu' (l or l' = e or mu). The analysis relies on a full simulation of the detector response and emphasis is put on explicit strategies for the measurement of experimental and background systematics from data. We also present an evaluation of expected 95\% C.L. exclusion limits in early Higgs boson searches. We show that these two channels alone should allow for excluding the Standard Model Higgs boson in the mass range of 140-230 GeV by the time when CMS or ATLAS collect 1~fb$^{-1}$ of data at a center-of-mass energy of 14 TeV. We also give an estimate of how the change of the LHC center-of-mass collision energy from 14 to 10 TeV would impact the Higgs boson exclusion limits.

### Primary author

Ms Cristina Botta (University of Turin and INFN)

 Slides