High Energy Physics Seminars

The Higgs boson is a result of electroweak symmetry breaking in the Standard Model. The Higgs is experimentally unobserved, despite the Standard Model's prediction of it's existence. We present a search for a Standard Model Higgs bosons produced in association with a W bosons in proton anti-proton collisions recorded at CDF. Our search uses a dataset corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 2.7/fb. Our candidate events have one high-momentum muon or electron, missing ET, and a Higgs that decays to a pair of b-quarks jets. We extended the reach of the search by including events without a triggered lepton. We employ several b-quark identification algorithms to enhance the purity of Higgs events. An Artificial Neural Network improves our discrimination of Higgs signal kinematics from background processes such as top pair production and W+jets. We perform a likelihood fit of the neural network output distribution and set 95% confidence level upper limit on the associated production cross section times branching ratio as a function of Higgs mass.