Conservative Estimate of the Doubly Charged Higgs Boson Background Using Kernel Density
Session Number
2
Advisor(s)
Dr. Peter Dong, IMSA
Location
A131
Discipline
Physical Science
Start Date
15-4-2026 11:10 AM
End Date
15-4-2026 11:55 AM
Abstract
Current left-right symmetric (LRS) theories predict a doubly charged particle produced via the Higgs mechanism. The LRS model would be more satisfactory than the Standard Model since it provides insight into neutrino flavor oscillations, parity violations, and lepton-quark symmetry in weak interactions. Due to the limited number of Monte Carlo events at the right tail of the background distribution, we must parameterize and extrapolate which creates greater uncertainty. Hence, our study aims to place a conservative lower bound on the mass of the doubly charged Higgs boson (using data from the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment from Run 2 of the Large Hadron Collider). We will use kernel density estimation to approximate the background probability density function (PDF) of the Monte Carlo samples at high-mass values. More formally, we set a 95% confidence level upper limit on the expected signal yield, μ, in the signal region by finding the greatest value of μ for which the observed event count, N, is consistent with a Poisson expectation of μ + b, where b is the estimated background. Averaging the Poisson tail probability over the background’s PDF and choosing the relevant μ provides a worst case scenario estimate of the background
Conservative Estimate of the Doubly Charged Higgs Boson Background Using Kernel Density
A131
Current left-right symmetric (LRS) theories predict a doubly charged particle produced via the Higgs mechanism. The LRS model would be more satisfactory than the Standard Model since it provides insight into neutrino flavor oscillations, parity violations, and lepton-quark symmetry in weak interactions. Due to the limited number of Monte Carlo events at the right tail of the background distribution, we must parameterize and extrapolate which creates greater uncertainty. Hence, our study aims to place a conservative lower bound on the mass of the doubly charged Higgs boson (using data from the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment from Run 2 of the Large Hadron Collider). We will use kernel density estimation to approximate the background probability density function (PDF) of the Monte Carlo samples at high-mass values. More formally, we set a 95% confidence level upper limit on the expected signal yield, μ, in the signal region by finding the greatest value of μ for which the observed event count, N, is consistent with a Poisson expectation of μ + b, where b is the estimated background. Averaging the Poisson tail probability over the background’s PDF and choosing the relevant μ provides a worst case scenario estimate of the background