Search for a new resonance decaying to a W or Z boson and a Higgs boson in the / ν / ν ν + b b̄ ℓ ℓ / ℓ ν / ν ν + b b ¯ final states with the ATLAS detector

A search for a new resonance decaying to a W or Z boson and a Higgs boson in the ℓℓ/ℓν/νν + b b final states is performed using 20.3 fb -1 of pp collision data recorded at √ s = 8 TeV with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider.The search is conducted by examining the W H/Z H invariant mass distribution for a localized excess.No significant deviation from the Standard Model background prediction is observed.The results are interpreted in terms of constraints on the Minimal Walking Technicolor model and on a simplified approach based on a phenomenological Lagrangian of Heavy Vector Triplets. IntroductionAlthough the Higgs boson discovery by the ATLAS [1] and CMS [2] collaborations imposes strong constraints on theories beyond the Standard Model (SM), the extreme fine tuning in quantum corrections required to have a light fundamental Higgs boson [3,4] suggests that the SM may be incomplete, and not valid beyond a scale of a few TeV.Various dynamical electroweak symmetry breaking scenarios which attempt to solve this naturalness problem, such as Minimal Walking Technicolor [5-8], Little Higgs [9], or composite Higgs models [10,11], predict the existence of new resonances decaying to a vector boson plus a Higgs boson.Using the full dataset collected by the ATLAS detector at 8 TeV centre-of-mass energy at the Large Hadron Collider, a search is performed for a heavy resonance decaying to V H, where V is a W or Z boson and H is the SM Higgs boson.This analysis looks for the leptonic decay of the W or Z boson and the Higgs decay into a b-quark pair.Therefore the selected final states are: zero charged leptons targeting Z (→ νν)b b decays, one charged lepton W (→ ℓν)b b, and two oppositely charged leptons Z (→ ℓℓ)b b where ℓ = e, μ.The search is performed by examining the distribution of e-mail: atlas.