The Higgs Boson on World Tour

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The mass of the Higgs boson is expected to be just above the current experimental limit of about 115 GeV. Unfortunately, such a light Higgs boson is difficult to find at LHC due to the enormous background at low energies. Our best bet is to search for events such as shown in Fig. 1, where a Higgs boson is produced in association with a top-antitop quark pair.

ttH process
Figure 1: Higgs boson production in association with a top-antitop quark pair.

About 50% of these rare events leave clear signatures in the detector. Hence they are easily recognized by a set of computers close to the experiment (the so-called trigger system). The remaining events that pass the first and second level triggers are much more complicated and can only be distinguished from the background with sophisticated selection techniques. However, ATLAS does not have sufficient computing resources available on site to actually apply these techniques.

A worldwide distributed trigger system that runs on top of a grid infrastructure can solve this problem. It would allow to harness remote computing resources in real-time and provides a cost-effective extension of the standard trigger system. As a result, more advanced algorithms can be run to improve the selection efficiency with a factor of 2. In other words, the measurement time needed for the discovery of a light Higgs boson can be halved.

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A worldwide distributed trigger system

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Last modified: Friday, 29 June 2007 @ 00:29:00
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