Fermilab: Higgs near 140 GeV favored in lνqq decays

In a few hours, the D0 Group at the Fermilab will release another interesting arXiv preprint on the Higgs boson,

Search for the standard model Higgs boson in the H ⇒ lνqq decay channel (full paper, WWW)

The Higgs decays to a WW pair, one W decays to two quarks, the other decays to a charged lepton and its neutrino partner.



The Higgs is not found but the graph above is pretty interesting.




The thick black line shows the observed data. They nearly agree with the Higgs-less SM prediction - the red dotted line including the green 1-sigma and yellow 2-sigma intervals.

The greatest excess of events is obtained for the Higgs mass around 140 GeV. This channel seems to be independent of previous papers. However, the figure around 140 GeV doesn't appear for the first time. In 2007, I noticed a bump near 140 GeV while others saw an excess near 160 GeV that was invisible to me. In July 2010, we mentioned a combined Tevatron 3-sigma excess of MSSM Higgs near 140 GeV.

While the paper assumes the Standard Model boson, the physics is not too different for the lightest MSSM Higgs boson and 140 GeV is the upper bound on the lightest MSSM Higgs boson mass - or slightly above it.