Abstract
A bstract A search is presented for the decay of the 125 GeV Higgs boson (H) to a pair of new light pseudoscalar bosons (a), followed by the prompt decay of each a boson to a bottom quark-antiquark pair, $$ \textrm{H}\to \textrm{aa}\to \textrm{b}\overline{\textrm{b}}\textrm{b}\overline{\textrm{b}} $$ H → aa → b b ¯ b b ¯ . The analysis is performed using a data sample of proton-proton collisions collected with the CMS detector at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 138 fb − 1 . To reduce the background from standard model processes, the search requires the Higgs boson to be produced in association with a leptonically decaying W or Z boson. The analysis probes the production of new light bosons in a 15 < m a < 60 GeV mass range. Assuming the standard model predictions for the Higgs boson production cross sections for pp → WH and ZH, model independent upper limits at 95% confidence level are derived for the branching fraction $$ \mathcal{B}\left(\textrm{H}\to \textrm{aa}\to \textrm{b}\overline{\textrm{b}}\textrm{b}\overline{\textrm{b}}\right) $$ B H → aa → b b ¯ b b ¯ . The combined WH and ZH observed upper limit on the branching fraction ranges from 1.10 for m a = 20 GeV to 0.36 for m a = 60 GeV, complementing other measurements in the μμττ , ττττ and bb ℓℓ ( ℓ = μ , τ ) channels.