Search for Higgs boson decays into a pair of pseudoscalar particles in the bb?? final state with the ATLAS detector in pp collisions at ?s=13??TeV

Abstract

This paper presents a search for decays of the Higgs boson with a mass of 125 GeV into a pair of new pseudoscalar particles, H?aa, where one a-boson decays into a b-quark pair and the other into a muon pair. The search uses 139?fb?1 of proton-proton collision data at a center-of-mass energy of ?s=13 TeV recorded between 2015 and 2018 by the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. A narrow dimuon resonance is searched for in the invariant mass spectrum between 16 GeV and 62 GeV. The largest excess of events above the Standard Model backgrounds is observed at a dimuon invariant mass of 52 GeV and corresponds to a local (global) significance of 3.3?(1.7?). Upper limits at 95% confidence level are placed on the branching ratio of the Higgs boson to the bb?? final state, B(H?aa?bb??), and are in the range 0.2–4.0×10?4, depending on the signal mass hypothesis.